About VDB

Mission

The Video Data Bank is committed to fostering awareness and scholarship of the history and contemporary practice of video and media art, to serving the artists represented in the VDB collection, to providing access to the collection, and to ensuring the future of the collection for generations to come.

About VDB

Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. The VDB’s collection has grown to include the work of more than 600 artists and 6,000 video art titles.

VDB is dedicated to fostering awareness and scholarship of the history and contemporary practice of video and media art through its distribution, education, and preservation programs.

The collection is made available to museums and galleries, libraries and educational institutions, cultural institutions and alternative exhibitors through a far-reaching national and international distribution service. Programs and activities include maintaining analog and digital archives of the collection, preservation of historically important works of video art, the commissioning of essays and texts that contextualize artists’ work, the publication of curated programs and artists’ monographs, and an extensive range of public programs, including the online streaming project VDB TV.

The VDB is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by donations from the public.

About SAIC

For more than 150 years, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has been a leader in educating the world’s most influential artists, designers and scholars. Located in downtown Chicago with a fine arts graduate program consistently ranking among the top four graduate fine arts programs in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, SAIC provides an interdisciplinary approach to art and design, as well as world-class resources, including the Art Institute of Chicago museum, on-campus galleries, and state-of-the-art facilities. For more information, please visit saic.edu.

Funders

The VDB is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

The VDB welcomes support for its activities from individual contributors. To make a tax deductible donation to the VDB, please visit our Support page.