- Larry Gottheim, Professor Emeritus
Larry Gottheim, Professor Emeritus:
My first artistic field was playing the clarinet. I went to the NYC High School of Music and Art as a music student. I played in several orchestras and went to Oberlin College because of the Music School, but soon turned to literature.
I got a degree in Comparative Literature from Yale. I went to Binghamton (then Harpur College) in the English Department. When I started making films I was able to teach some film courses. I had the desire to see if there could be an independent Department of Cinema, and eventually was able to start the Cinema Department.
I taught filmmaking and the study of cinema art, and was Chair for many years, bringing in new faculty and visitors from around the world. I left in 1988 and continue making video works. I have written a book that will be published early 2023. My films have continued to be screened throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia.
- Vincent Grenier, Professor Emeritus
Vincent Grenier, Professor Emeritus:
Vincent Grenier is a native of Quebec City, Canada. He has lived largely in the US mostly New York City and upstate New York. In spite of this, he was a frequent contributor to the Montreal Art scene of the 70’s and 80’s and the San Francisco bay areas where he received an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 70's. Grenier's experimental films have been shown in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan and China at showcases such as the Cineprobe at the Museum of Modern Art, the Anthology Film Archives, the Pacific Film Archives, the Collective for Living Cinema, Cinéma Parallel in Montréal, Centre George Pompidou in France, and MoCA Shanghai among many others. His films and videos have earned him nine production grants from the Canada Arts Council in the period between 1974 and1992, and in New York State, from CAPS (1979), NYFA (1995), ETC (1992 & 1994), NYSCA (2007) a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2010). He is the recipient of the 2019 Stan Brakhage Vision Award.
He has made over two dozen films and since the mid 90's nearly as many videos. Many of these videos were chosen for many years, in yearly selections at key experimental film festivals such as Views from the Avant-Garde of the New York Film Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, in the Netherland, the Onion City Film Festival, Chicago, and Media City Film and Video Festival, Windsor, Ontario. Grenier's films and videos were the subjects of retrospectives, recently at the Denver Film Festival, the Cinématheque Québecoise, and in the Fall of 2010 at Red Cat, LA Film Forum and Cal Arts, at Media City, Windsor, Ontario and Images Film & Video Festival's Canadian Images Spotlight, Toronto, both in 2006. Seven of his films & videos were curated in the Whitney Museum of American Art 1970-2000 American Century Film program.
His video Watercolor received in 2014, first prizes in the experimental category at the Black Maria Festival and Athens Film Festival. Les Chaises, earns Jury’s Choice, one of the first prizes, at Black Maria Film Festival 2009, and Honorable Mention at Media City Film & Video Festival, Windsor ON. Tabula Rasa (2004) was screened in “Best Avant Garde Films & Videos of the Decade” program at the Walter Read theater and won a second prize at the Media City Festival, Windsor, Canada. Here (2002) was awarded Gold for best Experimental film at the New York Film Expo. Color Study (2000) earned second prize at the Black Maria Film Festival. Feet (1994) won second prize at the 1995 Black Maria Festival and was shown in the WNET series Reel NY. His film Out in the Garden (1991) received Best Documentary at the 1992 Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Best Experimental Documentary at the 16th Atlanta Film/Video Festival. It was also shown on WNET and London Film Festival. Interieur Interiors (1978) was a second prize winner, at the San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival, and World in Focus (1976) was a second prize winner at Ann Arbor Film Festival. Films by Grenier are included in the National Film Archive, and the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, AGO in Toronto and at many other institutions in Canada and the US.
- Ralph Hocking, Professor Emeritus
Ralph Hocking, Professor Emeritus:
Ralph Hocking has spent his life making and teaching art. He began his teaching career at Binghamton University in 1968, and served as Professor of video and computer art and Chair of the Cinema Department at Binghamton University until his retirement in 1998. He has been a leader in the field of electronic media art since the 1960s, founding one of the first campus-based media access programs in the country at Binghamton University. In 1970 he established the independent nonprofit Experimental Television Center, with a residency and research program for artists, equipment access and training programs for the community, and regional and national exhibition programs.
He has served as consultant, advisor and panelist with such organizations as the New York State Council on the Arts, the University Wide Arts Committee, the Society for Photographic Education, the Massachusetts Arts Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and many museums and galleries. His personal creative work has been exhibited widely throughout the country and in Europe and is distributed by Video Data Bank. He has received support for his work from the NEA Visual Arts Fellowship Program and the New York State Council on the Arts.
He was creative director for the Experimental Television Center: 1969-2009 a 5 DVD set with 130 page catalog in distribution with Electronic Arts Intermix and Video Data Bank and The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued (Kathy High, Mona Jimenez, Sherry Miller Hocking (eds); Intellect Press, 2014) a two volume investigation of the development of creative video tools and systems designed and built by artists and technologists during the late 1960s and 70s.
- Ken Jacobs, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Ken Jacobs, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus:
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Ken Jacobs, was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1933. He studied painting with one of the prime creators of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann, in the mid-fifties. It was then that he also began filmmaking (Star Spangled To Death). His personal star rose, to just about knee high, with the sixties advent of Underground Film. In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic -rather than demagogic- cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. A nonprofit filmmaker’s co-operative open to all, it made available film equipment, workspace, screenings and classes at little or no cost. Later he found himself teaching large classes of painfully docile students at St. John’s University in Jamaica, Queens.
In 1969, after a week’s guest seminar at Harpur College (now, Binghamton University), students petitioned the Administration to hire Ken Jacobs. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, the Administration -during that special period of anguish and possibility- decided that, as a teacher, he was “a natural.” Together with Larry Gottheim he organized the SUNY system’s first Department of Cinema, teaching thoughtful consideration of every kind of film but specializing in avant garde cinema appreciation and production. (Department graduates are world-recognized as having an exceptional presence in this field.) His own early studies under Hofmann would increasingly figure in his filmwork, making for an Abstract Expressionist cinema, clearly evident in his avant garde classic Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1969) and increasingly so in his subsequent devising of the unique Nervous System series of live film-projection performances.
The American Museum Of The Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, hosted a full retrospective of his work in 1989, The New York Museum Of Modern Art held a partial retrospective in 1996, as did The American House in Paris in 1994 and the Arsenal Theater in Berlin in 1986 (during his 6 month stay as guest-recipient of Berlin’s DAAD award). He has also performed in Japan, at the Louvre in Paris, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, etc. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant. A 1999 interview with Ken Jacobs can be seen on the Net as part of The University Of California at Berkeley’s series of Conversations With History.
