Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmerman, professor of Screen Studies and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, has been appointed Head Curator and Writer for a National Touring Exhibiton,  “50 years of Participatory Community Media: On the Frontlines of Politics and Place, Media For, By and In the Community.”  

The project producer is Scribe Video in Philadelphia, the highly recognized community media center.  The project is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and other private foundations. The touring exhibition, currently in the research phase, will open in Spring 2018.

Scribe Video Center and Zimmermann will organize an exhibition of works produced from 1967 to 2017 by a range of media arts centers and community media producers from throughout the United States. Programs will be curated thematically:  Media Democracy; Health; Housing; Identities; Urban Spaces; Criminal Justice; State Violence; Education; Globalization; Environment; Immigration/Migration; and Jobs/Wages.  The project also probes multivocal authorship, participatory creativity, community conversations, and narrative structures. 

A catalogue and web-based materials will accompany the exhibition, in addition to packaging a portion of the programs for public broadcast. This National Touring Exhibition features works produced by and through Scribe Video Center and other community media makers.  Venues for this exhibition include Houston (Houston Cinema Arts Festival); New York (MoMA); Denver (Open Media Foundation); Minneapolis (Intermedia Arts); Berkeley (Pacific Film Archive); Philadelphia, to name a few.

The study of US independent film often focuses on feature length works produced by individuals for theatrical distribution or national broadcast television. While these are important and valuable works, this project is designed to expand the public understanding and the discourse about what independent non-fiction work can be and to place community produced participatory media in a framework that demonstrates its aesthetic and cultural value.