PROVIDENCE, RI.- The RISD Museum of Art presents Music Video/Silent Film: Innovations in the Moving Image, on view through Sunday, February 24, 2008. Music Video/Silent Film brings together pre-sound films and recent music videos with an eye for aesthetic and narrative innovation. Eight simultaneous installations of silent films and music videos will be on view in The Museum’s soaring Farago wing, with audio spotlight technology to provide for an intimate viewing experience.

Silent-era experimental films and recent cutting-edge music videos share some unexpected territory -- musicality of the moving image, visual innovation, and themes of technology and urbanization. The advent of cinema in 1895 brought a flurry of experiments with film’s unique capacity to make pictures move. By the 1920s, on the eve of synchronized sound, artists such as Man Ray, Fernand Léger, and Dziga Vertov were exploring dream narratives, conducting optical experiments, and translating the urban experience to celluloid. “Silent films” were not, in fact, silent, but screened to live musical accompaniment. Fifty years later, Music Television (1981) reversed this order, screening videos composed for recorded music. This new structure brought non-linear narrative to a mainstream television audience and inspired a fresh wave of experimentation. In the last decade, music video directors such as Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, and Stephen Sednoui have demonstrated a dazzling range of aesthetic and narrative innovations that recall the freedom and ingenuity of 1920s avant-garde filmmaking.

Music Video/Silent Film has been organized by Maya Allison, Curatorial Assistant of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum of Art. Her recent curatorial efforts include Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the present (2006, co-producer), and Export/Import: Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Art (2005, co-producer), and she is curator of The Museum’s Videos In Progress video art series. Before coming to The Museum in 2005, she programmed film series and festivals including the Independent Feature Project, New York, MIX NYC, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and the Post Modern Sisters. She holds a BA in art history from Reed College, and an MFA in film from Columbia University.