Various/Artists presents the first ever monographic gallery exhibition in New York City dedicated to Mexican artist and filmmaker Sarah Minter (1953-2016), organized in collaboration with her son Emiliano Rocha Minter and author/artist Fernando Llanos.

 

A key figure in Mexican video art, Minter’s background was linked to theater, film and graphic design. She burst onto the Mexico City scene with the shot-on-video punk docudrama Nadie es inocente (1986) and the indie feature followup Alma Punk (1991-92), both made in direct collaboration with street kids and punk communities in the Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl suburb of Mexico City. 

 

Minter moved fluidly between narrative and experimental cinema, large-format video installation, video sculpture, single-channel video and photography in a lifelong pursuit of new freedoms, both formal and thematic. She used the DIY ethics of punk to seek out utopian alternatives to contemporary society; to those who knew her, her autonomy was also represented by her ever-present bicycle. Along the way she found allies, partners and friends with whom she formed an emancipated community built on long-lasting bonds. These collaborators populate the visually fragmented worlds of her videos, each importing their own narratives and personal lives. 

 

This exhibition offers a small, focused survey of her creative legacy through production stills and short-format video works, including the United States premiere of the new restoration of Adagio, Minter’s very first short film from 1980. 

 

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Sarah Minter (born 1953 in Puebla, Mexico - died 2016, CDMX, Mexico) began creating videos, films, and video installations in the early 1980s, with notable works including San Frenesí (1983), Nadie es Inocente (1985–1987), MEX-METR (1987), Alma Punk (1991–1992), El aire de Clara (1994–1996), and Intervalos (2001–2004). Starting in the 1990s, alongside her artistic production, she promoted various educational and dissemination initiatives related to video art, such as La sala del deseo at the Centro de la Imagen and the Video Workshop  at the School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking “La Esmeralda” of CENART. Her work has been exhibited internationally and has been recognized by institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Angelica Foundation, FOPROCINE, and Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA). In 2014, she had a retrospective exhibition at MUAC, curated by Cecilia Delgado Masse and Sol Henaro. Her videos have been screened at MoMA in New York and broadcast on the Criterion Channel.