Videofreex: The Art of Guerrilla Television

The Videofreex were one of the world’s first video collectives, artists, activists, and storytellers who met at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and spent the following decade producing alternative media using the then-radical technology of portable video. In 1972, they established Lanesville TV in Lanesville, New York, the first pirate television station in the United States, broadcasting from a farmhouse called Maple Tree Farm. Their archive documents the counterculture movement, with footage of Abbie Hoffman, Fred Hampton, Women’s Liberation demonstrations, and the 1971 May Day anti-war march in Washington D.C. It is now held at the Video Data Bank in Chicago.

Videofreex: The Art of Guerrilla Television was an exhibition presented at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz from February through July 2015, organized by curator Andrew Ingall, and including 22 newly restored videotapes, over 90 photographs and slides, and nearly 80 archival objects. de.MO designed the accompanying exhibition catalogue, museum catalogue design, and art publication design for a 183-page illustrated volume distributed by SUNY Press, featuring texts by Andrew Ingall, Daniel Belasco, Tom Colley, Tom Roe, Sara J. Pasti, and David A. Ross.