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Feminist Studio Workshop Videoletter

Susan Mogul

1975 00:30:00 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:31/2" open reel video
Tags:
Art Collective, Art History, Artist Spaces, Documentation, Feminism, Gender, TV production

Description

In 1975, the Feminist Studio Workshop (I was a member) at the Woman’s Building in LA, the Women’s Interart Center in New York City, and another feminist organization in Washington DC, attempted to set up a video exchange among feminist art organizations. This was the first videoletter on our end. I don’t know if another one was ever made.

The videoletter is a tour of the Woman’s Building. Pam McDonald, with microphone in hand, another workshop member, and myself, served as guides through the building. It was shot with a black and white video portopack.

The tour includes interviews with various women in different parts of the building: Sheila De Bretteville, in one gallery discusses the Eileen Gray show- the first time Gray’s design work was shown in LA; Judy Chicago, at a book signing in the lobby, she had just published Through the Flower. Susan King, in the upstairs gallery, discusses the quilt show she had just organized, and Carol Kern at the opening of her one woman show in the community gallery, discusses how her WICCA pal, Z-Budapest, a witch, had just been arrested for reading tarot cards.

— Susan Mogul

This title is only available on Susan Mogul Videoworks: The Woman's Building

 

About Susan Mogul

Having been involved with video since the early 1970s, Susan Mogul is a pioneer of the medium. Initially producing an important series of humorous and staunchly feminist performance videos, her practice quickly expanded to more complicated and experimental forms of narrative, including feature length work. Mogul has received grants including: Guggenheim Fellowship, ITVS commission, National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Getty Trust Fellowship, and Center for Cultural Innovation grant. 

A survey of Moguls video/films took place in Vienna at the Austrian Film Museum in 2024. Mogul’s video/film retrospective was presented at Visions du Reel Film Festival in Switzerland in 2009. Driving Men (2008), a feature length documentary, screened in international competitions in Japan, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, and India. Mogul’s first solo museum exhibition – a major survey of her work- opened August 2022 at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland.

Mogul’s work has been featured in historic exhibitions: California Video at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles: Birth of an Art Capital at the Pompidou in Paris, and Where Art Might Happen: The early years of CalArts at the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria. Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video devotes a chapter to Mogul’s work and career. Mogul was the keynote speaker at a national conference in Zurich on film and autobiography.

Less is Never More, a solo installation was presented at as-is-la gallery in Los Angeles in 2019. Less... garnered a full-page review in the LA Times. A major essay in the 2020 summer issue of the Los Angeles arts quarterly, X-TRA, titled, A Feminist’s Survival Index, not only reviewed Mogul’s current work, but positioned it in the context of the history of feminist art, and her legacy as a Los Angeles artist.