Re-visiting the 12th St Jude Invitational

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, under the leadership of visionary de Saisset Director Lydia Modi-Vitale, the museum served a leading role in commissioning and exhibiting first generation video art. Serving as an incubator for experimentation, Bay Area conceptual artists were put in conversation with their Southern California and East Coast based counterparts resulting in a series of projects that helped cement video as a legitimate art form. Radical Video Histories explores this highly productive and experimental moment by restaging the 12th St. Jude Invitational (1972), which included video works by John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, George Bolling, Douglas Davis, Howard Fried, Taka Iimura, Paul Kos, Shiegeko Kubota, Bill Viola, and William Wegman. Replicating the curatorial logic prescribed by Lydia Modi-Vitale, the works will be divided into Program A, and Program B, and looped in their original sequence. Restaging this exhibition repositions the de Saisset as critical to the development, understanding, and broader reception of video art.

Re-visiting the 12th St Jude Invitational is curated by Ciara Ennis, Director and Chief Curator, de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University.

This exhibition is offered as part of the Bay Area Further Triennial