Video/Art: The First Fifty Years

A history of video art's first five decades by the curator who built the medium's collection and exhibition program at the Museum of Modern Art.

London follows artists as they took up consumer electronics, from analog television monitors to digital projection. Video moved from fringe experiment to a mainstream part of contemporary media art. The book combines art-historical analysis with personal memoir and profiles artists including Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Shirin Neshat, Pipilotti Rist, Miranda July, Ragnar Kjartansson and Ian Cheng. Phaidon published it in 2020, and ARTnews placed it among its best art books of that year.

Barbara London worked at MoMA from 1970 to 2013. She founded its video exhibition and collection programs in the mid-1970s and organized more than 500 media art exhibitions, among them Video Spaces: Eight Installations (1995) and Soundings: A Contemporary Score (2013). She launched the early museum website Stir-Fry in 1997 to document Chinese media art, and now teaches at Yale School of Art. This book draws on that curatorial career.