[The 90’s raw: Fax Art & Black Memorabilia]

Raw footage for the award-winning series The 90's. A fax art show and a black memorabilia trade show.

00:00Copy video clip URL Formal interview with Donald Russell (Art Resources International) about an art exhibition he organized with Nancy Drysdale. For this show, over 200 artists submitted pieces created with a fax machine. The exhibition is raising money for a political campaign, and as a reaction to the re-authorization of the National Endowment for the Arts. The man then goes on to speak unenthusiastically about censorship and government funding of the arts. “We need to support independent sources of imagery.”

18:16Copy video clip URL The man shows the fax machine pieces. Most of the art focuses on censorship and arts funding, often using technical or legal language. They are either on one piece of paper or multiple papers tacked together.

21:39Copy video clip URL Shots of the artwork for cutaways.

22:02Copy video clip URL Black memorabilia trade show. Videomaker Eddie Becker speaks with Rose Fontanella, a major collector. She speaks about individual pieces and also more theoretically about the value of facing negative history and using it to study our own culture’s evolution over time. One of the unusual objects in her possession is a Golywogg doll, which is a black stereotype from England and Australia (the connotations of which she is unable to describe).

27:30Copy video clip URL One of most emotionally difficult objects in the collection, for Fontanella, is an announcement for a slave auction, which describes the 40 slaves in detail. Fontanella finds many of these images offensive, such as the Coon Chicken restaurant logo, but claims that some of the objects in her collection are very positive. The main items she finds beautiful are the dolls, which she finds to be positive because they were objects of love for the owners. She also talks about the recent problems between blacks and Italians in Brooklyn, where she lives.

46:22Copy video clip URL She even shows Becker a few “topsy-turvy” dolls, in which the dress flips over so that one side is a black girl and the other is a white girl. Another topic is the recent trend of reproducing these images of blacks.

48:40Copy video clip URL A representative of another collection, Lewis of Lewis & Blaylock (?), talks about black memorabilia. He also feels there are both negative and positive images to be collected, but talks mainly about the need for education. He is on the front of Antiques and Collecting, and talks about what might be more recent popular items (for instance, things related to Jesse Jackson).

59:59Copy video clip URL B-roll of crowds browsing the memorabilia. One black woman has a very positive reaction to seeing some of the images at this show. Many of the maternal images remind her of childhood, like a woman churning butter or holding a child. It makes her feel good to see images of black people doing positive things like these, or to see black enterprises (like magazines) or clothing styles. Her interview is cut off by the end of the tape.

01:03:35Copy video clip URL End of tape.