Role: Director of New Initiatives

Client: Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation

Year: 2017-Present

Reanimating the work of a pioneering avant-garde media artist for contemporary audiences

 PROBLEM

Aldo Tambellini was a pioneering avant-garde multi-media artist who passed away at the age of 90 in November, 2020. He was a prolific sculptor, painter, poet, and video artist whose work focused on black in both physical and political dimensions. Tambellini worked at the bleeding edge of artistic consciousness, becoming the first to pioneer numerous artistic practices. For example, his painting The Echo marks the transition from traditional painting to media art as the shadow cast from a strobe inverts black and white on the canvas. In 1974, Tambellini's work on "The Medium is the Medium" at WGBH marked the first time video art was broadcast on TV. And in his later work with technicians at MIT and Bell Laboratories, he became the first person to send images electronically via "slow scan" technology. While many of his contemporaries have become well-known, Tambellini is not always included in the canon of artists who bridged abstract expressionism with media art, and his archive was left to his partner and friends to ensure that he received the recognition that he deserved.

SOLUTION

Starting in 2016 I began working with Aldo and his partner, Anna Salamone, to catalogue his artwork and to envision ways that his work could be reanimated and made relevant for people today. Recognizing how he expanded cinema with the use of multiple projectors on split screens, followed by projection-based performances in which entire rooms became canvases, I realized that his work could be seamlessly adapted to virtual reality. In 2017 we began work on a virtual reality piece, called To Be Enveloped by Black, which is currently in the final stages of production.

More recently in February 2020, before Aldo's studio was packed and shipped to the archive's new headquarters in Connecticut, I invited Val Jeanty (Afro-Electronica DJ), and dancers from Jean Appolon Expressions (including Appolon), to an experimental performance in response to his artwork. I coordinated documentation from this event and am currently editing a short reel to be used as a basis for further collaboration.

OUTCOME

• To Be Enveloped by Black is intended for completion this year. Look out for news about screenings at your local film festival.

• Experimental music and dance in response to Aldo’s work also remains a work in progress and a source of artistic inspiration for us all.