Curator Talk with Terri C. Smith at Real Art Ways

Press release

HARTFORD, CONN. Real Art Ways presents a curator talk with Terri C. Smith on her group exhibition Tubular Times: Camp, Horror, and Music Television: Video Art 1981-1993. The gallery walk through will begin at 3:30pm on Saturday, December 9 - free admission. The exhibition is on view through Sunday, January 14, 2023. Click here for gallery times and openings. Real Art Ways is located at 56 Arbor Street, Hartford.

Tubular Times: Camp, Horror, and Music Television: Video Art 1981-1993 is a group show curated by Terri C. Smith that explores innovative, often humorously irreverent video art made during the years of Vestron, a Connecticut-based video distribution and film production company.

During the talk, Terri C. Smith will give an informal walkthrough and description of the exhibition at 3:30pm for approximately 30 minutes. There will be time for questions with Smith until 5pm.

Exhibiting artists are: Peggy Ahwesh, Max Almy, Ericka Beckman, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Cecelia Condit, Cecilia Dougherty, Ulysses Jenkins, Nam June Paik, Ann Magnuson, Pipilotti Rist, and Michael Smith. It also includes a satellite installation featuring thematically-related work from the 2000’s by contemporary artists Am Schmidt and Willie Stewart.

Sharing qualities with Vestron's film catalog, many of the works in Tubular Times layer comedy, horror, and music to address 1980's political themes, including the AIDS crisis, a growing wealth gap, and Reagan-era backlash to the civil liberties of the 1960-70's.

The videos in Tubular Times exhibit a unique combination of urgency, desperation, camp, and techno celebration. Their tone and themes frequently parallel Vestron's catalogue of comedy, satirical spoofs, and thriller/horror projects which include the documentary Making Michael Jackson's Thriller and films such as Dirty Dancing, The Princess Bride, and Slaughter High.

About Terri C. Smith
Terri C. Smith is a curator with more than twenty-five years of experience at accredited museums and small, nonprofit art spaces, curating approximately eighty contemporary exhibitions and receiving three, multi-year grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, among other awards. She received national recognition for her work as the founding creative director of Franklin Street Works, an award-winning, critically recognized nonprofit art space that built community in and brought internationally exhibiting artists to Stamford, Connecticut from 2011 to 2020. Her practice often focuses on intersections of conceptual art and social justice themes as well as experimental art practices.

Curator Terri C Smith with exhibiting artist Cecilia Dougherty in front of her video "Sick" on the occasion of the opening reception of "Tubular Times," Oct. 21, 2023. Photo by Richard Klein.