[Frameworks] Gerald O'Grady

Thu Mar 28 16:03:02 UTC 2019

Thank you Ron for this lovely letter. I was always very curious about his
activities in Houston, but hadn't made time to look into it anymore than a
cursory glance, so I appreciate both your words and the references.

As you say, it's hard to know where to stop, but one additional point on
his resume, as Bob Harris pointed out to me some years ago: O'Grady was
also the first artistic director of the New York Summer School of the Arts
founded by Bob Reals (which continues to this day under the guidance of
Ghen Dennis) basically, a media arts residency for youth.

On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 11:20 AM Green, Ron Green <green.31 at osu.edu> wrote:

> Dear Frameworkers,
>
> In haste, I'm going to paste below a slight edit of a long email I sent
> yesterday to a group of friends from Rice University informing them of the
> death two days ago of our respected colleague, Gerry O'Grady.  Ron and
> Louisa Green
>
> Dear Baker/Rice Group,
>
> We're sorry to report to this group the sad news that Gerry O'Grady died
> yesterday morning about 11am in Boston. He has been living in Boston, where
> he had grown up, since his retirement from SUNY/Buffalo in the 1980s, and
> he was associated during much of that time with the media arts programs at
> Harvard and MIT.
>
> As some of you know, Louisa and I knew Gerry very well. During college and
> the early to middle part of our careers, he was our mentor at Rice and
> beyond, and the director of our advanced degrees at SUNY/Buffalo; he was
> our boss several times at various media arts institutions in Buffalo, and
> he was one of our closest friends. As Louisa said this morning, his
> presence for us is profound and permanent.
>
> For those of you who have asked from time to time what Gerry is up to, we
> can report that his presence in the field of media arts is equally profound
> and permanent. He is among a handful of people who invented and developed
> the academic and arts fields of film studies and media studies in the 1960s
> and '70s, and his conception of it was intellectually rich in a way that
> Louisa and I experienced in close proximity over several decades of its
> development, and which many of you from Rice can imagine if you ever had a
> class from him on any topic. A small, but seminal, portion of his
> accomplishment in the Buffalo period of his work is suggested in *Buffalo
> Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973-1990*, published
> by MIT Press in 2007--this 840-page anthology is devoted to Gerry and the
> program he built, and includes generous sections of the writings of the
> incredible group of artists he hired , including Hollis Frampton, Paul
> Sharits, Woody Vasulka, Steina, Tony Conrad, James Blue, and Peter Weibel..
>
> Gerry received a lifetime achievement award from Anthology Film Archives
> in NYC some years ago; he was also a member of a small group of advisors
> that launched the Media Arts Program in DC, one of the disciplinary arms of
> the National Endowment for the Arts, a non-academic, arts-oriented agency
> that I worked for as Asst. Dir. during one of my early stints away from
> Gerry's own institutions. Gerry was also instrumental in organizing the
> centralized media interests of the SUNY system via a report that Louisa
> wrote after visiting SUNY's numerous campuses.
>
> It is hard to know where to stop; Louisa just reminded me of the whole
> period in Houston, after Gerry left Rice but before he was underway at
> Buffalo, when Gerry was retained by John and Dominique de Menil to
> establish a media arts center at St. Thomas. We worked with him on that one
> too during summer break. Gerry published an important essay titled "Lessons
> in Development: John and Dominique de Menil and the Media Arts," in the
> well-reviewed book devoted to the de Menils, *Art and Activism: Projects
> of John and Dominique de Menil* (Menil Collection and Yale University
> Press, 2010). In another recent book on the de Menils--*Double Vision:
> The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil*,
> William Middleton, Alfred A. Knopf, 2018--Gerry figures prominently in the
> sections on the media arts. The following excerpt gives some idea of what
> Gerry's life became soon after he left Rice:
>
> “By that time, John de Menil was beginning to organize a film department
> at the University of St. Thomas. He hired a young professor from the State
> University of New York at Buffalo, Gerald O'Grady, to get it off the
> ground. One summer day in 1967, John was in New York, as was O'Grady, so
> [John] asked if he could be free for a few days for a trip down to Houston.
> O'Grady was picked up by limousine and bundled onto the Schlumberger plane,
> where a chef prepared a steak dinner for the two of them.
>
> “When they arrived at the de Menil house [BTW, this was the Philip Johnson
> house on Westheimer Road], John showed the young professor to his room, one
> of the children's rooms, and said that he would come collect him at 7:30
> p.m. at the appointed hour, John met his guest and ushered him into the
> living room. Sitting there waiting for them was Italian film director
> Michelangelo Antonioni [p352].”
>
> Louisa has some additions to this story that she will tell later, since
> Gerry called us when he got in to Houston and we drove to the de Menil’s
> house and walked right in, thinking it was a gallery.
>
> Other entries in that book describe Gerry's building of the media center
> at St. Thomas. That media center was eventually transferred officially to
> Rice and lives on now, some fifty years later, as the Rice University Media
> Center and the Rice Cinema, a public screening program of the Center. Gerry
> also, indirectly through his recruiting of James Blue, caused the founding
> in 1977 of the Southwest Alternate Media Project in Houston, called SWAMP,
> a major public media center now also 50+ years old. There are many more
> credits and stories.
>
> If any of you have stories to add, we would love to hear them and we can
> forward them to Chris Downing [downing.christine at gmail.com] in Boston, a
> friend and former colleague of ours in Gerry's enterprises. She has been
> with Gerry during this crisis and is collecting memories from whomever
> would like to share.
>
> We're going to send this now, so people are informed as soon as possible.
>
> Very best wishes,
>
> Ron and Louisa Green
>
>
> Ron Green
> 356 W 7th Ave
> Columbus OH 43201
> 614.421.2131
>
>
> J. Ronald Green
> Professor Emeritus of Film Studies
> Department of History of Art
> The Ohio State University
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*Curator*
*Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center*
617 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14203
PUBLIC HOURS: Tuesday-Saturday, 12–5pm
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