ROCHESTER, NY.- The Viola-Perov Trust has agreed to donate the complete set of the master recordings for the moving image artworks by Bill Viola to the George Eastman Museum for the purpose of creating the definitive digital master of each work and assuring its long-term preservation. The donation will include more than 200 artworks originally recorded on magnetic media, as well as on 35mm film.


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“The George Eastman Museum, well known for its leadership in collecting and preserving motion picture films, is equally dedicated to contemporary moving image works,” said Dr. Bruce Barnes, Ron and Donna Fielding Director, George Eastman Museum. “Bill Viola is internationally recognized as having been, for decades, a pioneer and leading figure in time-based art. This is a landmark project and donation for the museum.”

Bill Viola, who passed away in July 2024, was instrumental in establishing video as a vital form of contemporary art and greatly expanding its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. In the early 1970s, when artists were just beginning to work with video, Viola was recognized as a technical wizard in the new and evolving methods of recording and editing. For forty-five years he created videos, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video works, and videos for television broadcast.

In 1977, Viola was invited to show his video works at La Trobe University (Melbourne) by its Cultural Arts Director Kira Perov. A year later, she joined him in New York, where they married and began a lifelong professional collaboration. She is the trustee of the Viola-Perov Trust, which stewards Bill Viola’s artistic legacy, and the director of Bill Viola Studio. She actively collaborates with museums to organize and facilitate exhibitions and catalogues of Viola’s works.

“The Eastman Museum has demonstrated expertise in the state-of-the-art digitization of moving image artworks,” said Kira Perov. “Our collaboration is a significant step in preserving in perpetuity the legacy of this important body of work. Bill Viola Studio is very much looking forward to working together with the museum’s technical and curatorial staff in achieving our shared objective.”

During his career, Viola used video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism.

Viola’s artworks have been presented—individually and in major exhibitions—in museums worldwide and are found in many distinguished museum and private collections. His single-channel videos have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, and his writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers. His installations create total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound.

“This major project builds on our experience with William Kentridge’s donation of the masters for his moving image works. We are keenly aware that works recorded and stored on any form of magnetic media are much more vulnerable to deterioration than works on film,” said Dr. Peter Bagrov, senior curator of the Moving Image Department of the George Eastman Museum. “Bill Viola’s artworks will be digitized at high resolution and stored redundantly according to best archival practices.”

For each artwork, the project will create an archival digital master, to be stored at the museum, and an identical artist’s digital master, which will be held by the Viola-Perov Trust. The museum will retain the source recordings, and the archival digital masters will be periodically migrated to redundant storage on new generations of digital media. The Eastman Museum will be the permanent archival moving image repository for research on Bill Viola’s works by scholars and artists.

Bill Viola (1951–2024) received his BFA in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University, where he studied visual art with Jack Nelson and electronic music with Franklin Morris. In the 1970s, he served as technical director of production for Art/Tapes/22 in Florence; traveled widely to study and record traditional performing arts in the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali, and Japan; and was artist-in-residence at the WNET Channel 13 Television Laboratory (New York), where he created a series of works that premiered on television. Starting in the 1980s, his artistic practice concentrated on time-based media works for exhibition in museums. In 1989, he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Viola was chosen to represent the United States at the 1995 Venice Biennale, creating five new installations. A midcareer survey, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997, traveled to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. He collaborated with Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen on a production of Tristan und Isolde, which premiered at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2004, followed by a fully-staged version at the Paris Opera in 2005. A major Bill Viola retrospective at Guggenheim Bilbao in 2017 drew over 710,000 visitors. His work is represented by James Cohan, New York; Kukje Gallery, Seoul; and Southern & Partners, London.


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