Stan VanDerBeek

Untitled, ca. 1970

Charcoal and color pastel on rubbing paper

17 x 22 inches

Courtesy of Stan VanDerBeek Archive and Magenta Plains, New York

Selected by The Drawing Center

Stan VanDerBeek (b. 1927, New York, NY – d. 1984, Baltimore, MD) was a pioneering American multimedia artist whose work spanned experimental film, expanded cinema, computer art, performance, and telecommunications. He believed deeply in technology’s capacity to expand human experience, imagining new forms of communication and collective cultural exchange. As he wrote, "new technologies will open higher levels of psychic communication and neurological referencing.”

Throughout his career, VanDerBeek explored how rapidly evolving media technologies might reshape our understanding of the world and one another. During his tenure at Bell Labs (1964–71) and as the first artist-in-residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (1970), he collaborated with artists, scientists, and engineers on new forms of image-making,transmission, and audience participation. Landmark projects including the immersive Movie-Drome, the multi-site fax murals Panels for the Walls of the World, and his experiments with public television exemplify his technological prescience, humanist idealism, and poetic curiosity.

VanDerBeek studied at Cooper Union in New York (1948–52) and Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1949–50). His work has been featured in major exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; MIT List Visual Arts Center; Walker Art Center; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Met Breuer; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Venice Biennale.

His work is held in numerous public collections, including MoMA, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Art Institute of Chicago,LACMA, Centre Pompidou, and Museo Reina Sofía.