Joan Logue (b. 1942) is a pioneer in the field of video portraiture. She first learned to use the medium soon after it became available to artists with Sony's introduction of the video Portapak in the late sixties. As a still portrait photographer, Logue immediately recognized the new medium's potential for expressing more fully the complexity of the sitter. Although Logue's background was not in film (she studied painting and photography), early on she discovered that video expanded painting and still photography, taking the ‘instant’ out of portraiture to give it a presence in real-time. For this reason, she is recognized as the "originator" of the first video portrait in 1971. There, by using real time and silence to expose the sitter’s presence, she allowed the viewer to observe a person in contemplation and silence.
Since 1971, Joan Logue has completed hundreds of video portraits for installations. In 1979, she developed another form of portraiture called 30 Second Portraits (Spots). Both styles of her portraiture include artists, families, lovers, fisherman, writers, poets, philosophers, composers, street people and auto portraits. Her works have been seen in America and abroad in installations that Logue calls video portrait galleries. They include portraits of Jasper Johns, Willem DeKooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, John Cage, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Anna Halprin, Lucinda Childs, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Boulez, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez to name only a few.
Joan Logue currently resides in New York, but originally lived and worked in Los Angeles until 1977. There, she became the first photographic portrait artist at the American Film Institute (1969), and pioneered the first video program at the American Film Institute. As a resident of California, she also taught at the California Institute of the Arts (1971-74), the University of California Los Angeles (1975), and the Otis Art Institute (1976).
After moving to New York in 1977, Logue expanded her scope, receiving a series of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1978, 1982, 1983, 1989) as well as grants from the French Ministry of Culture (1983, 1985, 1991, 1992) which enabled her to create two Paris series plus The Portrait of a Young Girl within a 3d frame and an Auto Portrait 1983-1993. She also received grants from the CAPP Street Project (1984), the Massachusetts Council on the Arts (1985,1988), the New York State Council on the Arts (1982,1989), the New York Cultural Assistance Program (CAP) grant (1978,1982), the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Fellowship (1986), the Pew Charitable Trust grant (1999), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1998). Simultaneously, she began to widen the breadth of her teaching career, holding a variety of international positions at the L'école nationale supérieure d'art de Nancy (1991), L’ecole supérieure des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg (1992), L'école des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux (1993) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1996). She also held portraiture artist in residence fellowships at the American Center in Paris (1982,1983), the Centres d’Art Contemporain de Montbeliard, Montbeliard (1982), the Centres d’Art Contemporain de Montpellier, Montpellier, France (1983), and Belo Horizonte, Brazil (1989).
