Live now at youtube.com/MOCAtv

The Museum of Contemporary Art presents MOCAtv, a new contemporary art video channel for the expanding, international, online audience interested in visual culture. Developed as a digital extension of the museum’s education and exhibition programming, MOCAtv is the first and only dedicated art channel to be part of YouTube’s original channels announced October 2011, and is part of YouTube Education, a collection of more than 700,000 videos on a wide range of educational topics from math to science, history to geography. Views of educational content on YouTube more than doubled during 2011 and in just the last year, the number of subscribers to YouTube’s educational channels also more than doubled. MOCAtv will add curated and original videos to inform, educate and engage this global, interactive audience about contemporary art and its intersection with film, video, music, performance, dance, music, comedy, and more.

“MOCAtv is a timely and vital digital extension of the museum. The channel will attract the growing online audience of people on every continent who are interested in visual culture, and provide them with the opportunity to see, explore, and experience the art of today,” said MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch.

“There’s enormous appetite on YouTube for arts, science and educational videos, and the new MOCAtv channel is going to help meet that need. We’re looking forward to seeing the innovative approach that MOCAtv takes in making contemporary art and culture widely accessible in the YouTube era,” said Tom Sly, Head of News and Education at YouTube.

Effective October 1, 2012, every new subscriber to MOCAtv, wherever they are in the world will receive a complimentary three-month MOCA membership providing access to and information about the museum and its exhibitions and programs. MOCAtv’s membership campaign aims to grow the museum’s membership, drawing from the museum’s growing online audience and the increase in out-of-town, cultural visitors to MOCA and to Los Angeles. Subscription to MOCAtv is free.

With a current, combined online audience reach of 3.5 million people, MOCAtv will further engage and develop this expanding audience with a diverse slate of original and curated video content, drawing from and enhancing the museum’s program. MOCAtv is commited to present historical, newly created, and curated content, and the channel’s preliminary schedule will focus on the presentation of art and related cross-disciplinary projects developed for a broad, international audience. While the channel will reflect the museum’s program, it will also present new and complementary content.

MOCAtv will feature videos by and about artists whose works are included in the museum’s renowned permanent collection and who have been featured in group and monographic exhibitions at MOCA such as Chris Burden, Theaster Gates, Raymond Pettibon, Sterling Ruby, Kenny Scharf, Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber. Artists contributing to and featured on the channel at launch include Bruce Conner, Tracey Emin, Spike Jonze and Retna. MOCAtv curators, who will be tasked to curate their selections of contemporary art video content from YouTube, include at launch, Brendan Fowler, Dilly Gent, Matthew Higgs, and Chris Johanson. Additional contributors will be presented as the channel evolves.

At launch MOCAtv’s programming will be presented in six distinctive strands including, Artist Video Projects, The Artist’s Studio, Art in The Streets, Art + Music, MOCA U, and YouTube Curated by, that will explore the confluence of art and related creative disciplines and cultural developments. New content will be added throughout year.

Upcoming programming highlights include in October, the premiere of CINETHESIS, a new series exploring the historical collaborations between artists and musicians through music videos, with the legendary artist and video director Bruce Conner; and the exclusive video and unique collaboration between the band Japanther and the 2012 Animation Students from the California State Summer School for the Arts. Overseen by Lori Damiano and Devin Flynn, the video features short animations by each student, inspired by the Japanther song, She’s the One.

On November 13, 2012, MOCAtv will premiere Mutual Core, a new music video by Björk directed by Los Angeles filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang.

MOCAtv PROGRAMMING AT LAUNCH

ARTIST VIDEO PROJECTS — presenting a new video every Monday
WEST COAST VIDEO ART is a new and original series, featuring interviews and rarely seen works by seminal video artists including Eleanor Antin, Skip Arnold, Chris Burden, Ant Farm, Ulysses Jenkins, Martha Rosler, Ilene Segalove, John Sturgeon, and Marnie Weber. This series is produced, directed and edited by Los Angeles based Peter Kirby of Media Art Services.

MOCAtv PRESENTS spotlights the work of significant contemporary moving image artists, both emerging and established. The lineup will include programs that delve into the work of individual artists alongside curated samplers that bring together a range of videos around a particular theme. Artists featured in this series will include Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Dynasty Handbag, and Jim Shaw.

A special celebration of legendary, experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas will be presented to coincide with an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery and retrospectives at the British Film Institute, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

MOCAtv Presents is organized with the support of specialist curators such as Michael Connor in New York and Artprojx’s David Gryn in London. Gryn will focus on video artists with cinematic qualities and a heightened melancholia, tension and anxiety in their work, with artists to include Nick Abrahams, Shoja Azari, Stuart Croft, Meredith Danluck, Jesper Just, Jumana Manna, Hans Op de Beeck, Nicolas Provost, Sam Samore, Matthew Stone, Kerry Tribe, and Susanna Wallin. Connor will present New York video artists, as well as a Halloween-themed series Techno Mystic, in which artists such as Shana Moulton, Seth Price, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, use modern technologies to access the world of spooks and spirits.

A special focus on performativity will present work by artists including Naomi Fisher, Rashaad Newsome, and Emily Roysdon, who use the language of the body to construct new and hybrid identities.

THE ARTIST’S STUDIO — presenting a new video every month
THE ARTIST’S STUDIO provides extraordinarily candid insider access into the mind, work, life and process of some of the most significant artists working today. LA-based artist Sterling Ruby allows MOCAtv into his studio to film the never filmed before process of pouring the dyed urethane resin, which creates his iconic and coveted Monument Stalagmite sculptures. Raymond Pettibon invites MOCAtv into his LA studio to discuss music and other things that inspire him. A conversation between Mark Bradford and choreographer/dancer Benjamin Millepied results in an unusual and collaborative performance. And in his special series that fulfills a lifetime ambition, artist Kenny Scharf stars in an anarchic and entertaining version of a classic public television “how to” series teaching his audience how to paint.

ART+MUSIC — presenting a new video every Wednesday
ART AND MUSIC ORIGINALS is a series of specially commissioned collaborations between artists and musicians, including Los Angeles filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang with Björk, Galen Pehrson with experimental rap group Death Grips, photographer Polly Borland and celebrated film director John Hillcoat with IO Echo, and Tracey Emin with singer/songwriter Harper Simon.

THE ART OF PUNK is a new documentary series created by writer/author of ‘Fucked Up + Photocopied’, Bryan Ray Turcotte (Kill Your Idols), and Bo Bushnell (The Western Empire), tracing the roots of the punk movement and the artists behind the iconic logos of punk bands such as: Black Flag (Raymond Pettibon), The Dead Kennedys (Winston Smith), and Crass (Dave King). Including interviews with former band members, notable artists, and celebrities who have been heavily influenced by the art of punk rock.

BLUES FOR SMOKE is a new series, created to accompany MOCA’s upcoming exhibition, Blues for Smoke curated by Bennett Simpson, opening at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA on Oct 21, 2012–January 7, 2013. A series of filmed interviews explore the blues aesthetic in contemporary art and culture, featuring Princeton professor Cornell West, TV presenter and producer Tavis Smiley, musicians Nas and Henry Rollins, and many others.

MOCA U — presenting a new video every month
MOCA U is an entertaining series of art education talks, delivered with wit and wisdom by artists, academics, critics and art world cognoscenti. Preliminary programming includes curator Paul Schimmel as he introduces the upcoming MOCA exhibition, Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void 1949-1962, as well as Art Center’s Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and artist Rebecca Norton in conversation about collaboration.

ART IN THE STREETS — presenting a new video every Thursday
ART IN THE STREETS will present a mixture of brand new work from the world’s most exciting street artists, classic documentation about the history of street art, and user generated content comprising new street art from around the world.

NEW WORK is a series of short films created by a team of specially selected filmmakers who have worked closely with renowned artists including Barry McGee, Retna, JR, Swoon, and ROA to present a fresh and insider vision of their work and lifestyles. The creative director of the NEW WORK program is Alex Stapleton, director of Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel and Outside In: The Story of Art in the Streets, in collaboration with Ethel Seno, editor of Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art and coordinator of the Art in the Streets exhibition at MOCA. Among anticipated projects, NEW WORK will document a groundbreaking mural project in Los Angeles’ Skid Row district. Skid Row FreeWalls is dedicated to infusing life and hope into a community of residents, workers, and commuters in downtown Los Angeles.

CLASSIC DOCUMENTATION presents classic films that show key moments in the history of street art and graffiti, including subway art in New York City in the 1980s and cholo graffiti in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Venturing into the video archives, directors Henry Chalfant of Subway Art, Manfred Kirchheimer of Stations of the Elevated, and David Em of Graffiti Fever will personally introduce their historic documentation. The film series also presents popular and important films created for the Art in the Streets exhibition by artists such as Craig Stecyk, Spike Jonze and Mister Cartoon. If you missed the MOCA exhibition Art in the Streets or wanted to see them again, look for these videos on MOCAtv.

UPLOAD MORE ART is a new street art video project that encourages the MOCAtv audience to upload videos of street art from around the world, highlighting the movement in Egypt, Chile, and South Africa. Users will be able to tag their videos for guest curators, who will select their favorites. Curators include MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch, photographer Martha Cooper, and writer Carlo McCormick, among other figures that have made important contributions to the understanding of art in the streets.

YOUTUBE CURATED BY — presenting a new video every Thursday
YouTube Curated By is a series of hosted playlists, for which artists, tastemakers and art world celebrities curate from the best contemporary art and visual culture content on YouTube.