The Downtown Pop Underground

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Best known for his Pop Art silkscreened work, Andy Warhol was a key connector figure who circulated not only through uptown art circles, but also within the underground film, poetry, theater, and music scenes. [more]

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Interview magazine contributor Anton Perich—who documented the scenes at Max’s Kansas City and the Mercer Art Center with his Super 8 film and Portapak video camera—also began making his own public access show, Anton Perich Presents, which debuted in January 1973. [more]

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Haralambos Monroe “Harry” Koutoukas was an outré playwright with a kaleidoscopic way with words, whose plays were presented at many of the key Off-Off-Broadway venues: Caffe Cino, La MaMa, Theatre Genesis, and Judson Poets’ Theatre. [more]

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Mary Curtis Ratcliff was one of the three founding members of the Videofreex, which began in the downtown loft she purchased while working as a teacher before the group expanded and moved into a larger loft in SoHo. [more]

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Nancy Cain joined forces with the Videofreex after CBS contracted them to produce the pilot television show, Subject to Change, and she stayed with the group after it was cancelled and the 'freex moved to Upstate New York. [more]

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Paul Dougherty got involved in video during the early 1970s as a college student and later documented the nascent punk movement in New York City, cofounding the Metropolis Video collective with Pat Ivers while working at Manhattan Cable’s public access station. [more]

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Rudi Stern produced light shows for LSD guru Timothy Leary  before cofounding the video-making collective Global Village, one of the many video groups that coalesced downtown that included the Videofreex, Raindance, and People’s Video Theater. [more]

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Shirley Clarke began as a dancer before becoming a headstrong filmmaker who directed The Connection and The Cool World; by the late 1960s she had largely abandoned the film world to become a video pioneer, forming the Tee Pee Video Space Troupe with her daughter Wendy Clarke. [more]

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Skip Blumberg joined the Videofreex after they had moved into their SoHo loft on Prince Street, which was still being built, and he slept on a mattress on a pile of sheet rock while construction proceeded. [more]

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The Kitchen was founded by early video pioneer Steina Vasulka and her husband Woody, two immigrants who created an alternative arts space at Mercer’s that programmed everything from video to electronic music. [more]

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Wendy Clarke is the daughter of Shirley Clarke, and together they began experimenting with video in the late 1960s—forming the Tee Pee Video Space Troupe and collaborating with other pioneering video artists, such as the Videofreex. [more]