Announcing 2021’s Preservation Access Program Awardees!

Published On: April 6, 2021 |

BAVC Media is proud to announce the recipients of the 14th round of our Preservation Access Program, made possible by generous grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and California Humanities through which BAVC Media is able to subsidize the cost of preserving analog audio and video, allowing us to offer our expertise and services to individuals and artists that would otherwise not be able to afford them.

In order to consider the applications that BAVC Media receives, a panel of local archivists, artists, media producers, and community members is assembled to select participants for each round. The roster of accepted projects in 2021 is compiled of a wonderful and diverse group of artists, documentarians, filmmakers, poets, libraries, archives, and arts organizations.

BAVC Media has a particular interest in providing digitization services to underrepresented voices and communities. We are proud to be preserving the following collections, many of which feature women, low-income individuals, people of color, and LGBTQ communities, so that future generations may have access to these recorded histories.

East Side Arts Alliance: EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA) is a collective of BIPOC cultural workers who live and work in East Oakland. Their mission is to unite art with activism to work for community empowerment and cultural development. To build bridges between the disenfranchised and racially divided communities we serve. ESAA is a grassroots, community cultural center located in the San Antonio district of East Oakland, California, one of the most diverse and underserved communities in the country. Their collection includes rare audio and visual footage from the Malcolm X Community JazzArts Festival, public forums and town hall meetings, exhibit receptions and public art performances by local, national, and international artists.
Knox County Public Library: The Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound holds more than 5,000 reels and videotapes filmed in or relating to East Tennessee, the earliest dating to 1915. The 1⁄4” open reel audio tapes being preserved are from the Knoxville College Audio Collection at TAMIS. These tapes document various public performances and events at the Historically Black College in Knoxville, Tennessee from the 1950s through the 1970s. Included are music performances recorded at the school, Campus Spotlight series, convocations, lectures, poetry readings, and an interview with Knoxville College President Dr. Robert L. Owens III.
June L Mazer Lesbian Archives: The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives is the largest major archive on the West Coast dedicated to preserving and promoting lesbian and feminist history and culture. By creating a safe place for women to explore the richness of lesbian history, perhaps adding to it themselves, we are paving the way for future generations to understand more fully their own identity and history and help maintain this vital link to their own past. The collection to be preserved includes audio cassettes from the Lillian Faderman Collection. The tapes contain multigenerational conversations and oral history interviews with lesbians, queer folks, and subcultural influencers conducted by lesbian scholar, Lillian Faderman.
Caterina De Re: Caterina De Re is an artist based in Seattle, WA. While at SBSTV in the late 80s she worked alongside many of Australia’s leading independent filmmakers. This powerful root in cross-cultural documentary is key to her interdisciplinary art practice using video art, installation, improvised vocals, electroacoustic composition and performance. Under the mentorship of Pauline Oliveros, she became the first Australian certified as a Deep Listening teacher. She is focusing her skills on the preservation of unique Tibetan culture and arts associated with the Tibetan exile community of Khampagar Monastery. The documentation of this culture and its rituals are contained on the tapes being digitized through this program.
Chicago Film Archives: Chicago Film Archives is a regional film archive dedicated to identifying, collecting, preserving and providing access to films that represent the Midwest. Their purpose is to serve institutions and filmmakers of this region and elsewhere by establishing a repository for institutional and private film collections. Between 1976-1978, historian and filmmaker William F. Grisham made The Very Last Laugh, a documentary about the Chicago-based Ebony Film Corporation and Luther J. Pollard (1878-1977), the African American filmmaker who headed up production at the studio. Among the tapes being preserved through this program is an interview with Pollard and his role as the founder and owner of Ebony Film Co., making him the first African American film producer in history.
Susan Milano: Susan Milano is an activist and video artist. In the 1970’s she quickly fell in with the “street television” style documentary-making popular with seminal groups at the time, and in 1972, not long after Steina and Woody Vasulka had started The Kitchen, Steina asked Milano to organize a video festival there that would feature work done by women. Among the works being preserved as part of this program are tapes from The Women’s Video Festival, which featured videotapes created, produced or directed by women. There were no limitations as to content or form and tapes were not excluded if men worked on them, however it was emphasized that the tapes were originated by women.
Trinh T. Minh-ha: Originally trained as a musical composer, who received her two masters and Ph.D. from University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a world-renowned independent filmmaker, feminist, and post-colonial theorist. She teaches courses that focus on women’s work as related to cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and the arts. The films of hers being preserved can be viewed in general as different attempts to expand and open up the boundaries between cultures. They seek to enhance our understanding of the heterogeneous societies in which we live, while inviting the viewer to reflect on the conventional relation between supplier and consumer in media production and spectatorship.
Jon Reiss: Jon Reiss is a critically acclaimed filmmaker, author, and one of the most widely recognized media strategists in the business. He began his film career at the notorious Target Video where he not only shot seminal bands such as Black Flag, Iggy Pop, Throbbing Gristle, The Cramps but booked tours with the finished films throughout Europe in the early days of video projection. It was at Target where Reiss met Mark Pauline and edited the first compilation of Survival Research Laboratories seminal robotic performances. The tapes being preserved come from the archive of Mark Pauline/Survival Research Laboratories. Reiss is currently in production on a feature length documentary: Dangerous and Disturbing: The Mark Pauline Story.
People’s Video Theater – Survival Arts Media: The People’s Video Theater used Sony PortaPaks to chronicle the counterculture and liberation movements that transformed the politics of America in the 1970s. The collective’s mission was to explore uses of the video medium for creative self-expression and community empowerment. Survival Arts Media, a successor collective explored uses of the medium in diverse areas including; improvisational street theater, political activism, artistic biography, public access television, and immersive multimedia performance. The tapes being preserved are historic early video content of political activism, artists and cultural events on the east coast during the 1970s. There are recordings of significant liberation movements, the downtown SOHO arts community and the Lower East Side culture.
Iza Pardinas: Born and raised in San Francisco, CA, Iza Pardinas is a performance artist, singer, dancer, spoken word poet, and SF Commons public access TV Producer. Her works promot one love and peace for all people through music, art, poetry, video, performances and activism. Her collection includes documentation of the San Francisco music, art, and graffiti scenes from decades past. Also included is a documentary about the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Kate Linhardt: Kate Linhardt is an independent documentary filmmaker and freelance video editor based in Oakland, California. Over the past 10 years I have worked on a variety of projects, ranging from documentary films, commercial web content, film trailers, reality television, short films, and music videos. She served as an editor on Keepers of the Game, an Emmy nominated feature-length documentary about a Native American girls’ lacrosse team, produced by Tribeca Digital Studios. The film premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. The tapes in her collection are primarily sit-down interviews, shot and conducted by her uncle Paul Linhardt, of his parents, grandparents, and other relatives, all Holocaust survivors, recounting their lives and experiences in Hungary 1931-1956 and their subsequent resettlement in the United States.