What does access to art look like? Today, anyone with an internet connection can explore art from around the world in seconds. But long before streaming and social media transformed how we can experience culture, a collaboration in Boston was already imagining a new way to bring contemporary art into people’s homes.
Beginning in 1983, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) partnered with WGBH’s New Television Workshop and a group of artists to launch the Contemporary Art Television Fund (CAT Fund). Their goal was bold: commission and co-produce experimental video art and support its distribution, including broadcasting it directly to living rooms. The CAT Fund challenged expectations—expanding both the possibilities of the medium and the meaning of access.
Join us for a conversation revisiting this pivotal moment in contemporary art and Boston’s key role in the history of video art, while exploring current debates around public broadcasting and cultural access. This discussion features pioneering video artist and former MassArt faculty Tony Oursler, Susan Goldberg, president of GBH, and Meghan Clare Considine, ICA Curatorial Assistant, and moderated by Nora Burnett Abrams, ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. Together, they’ll explore how artists, institutions, and public media reshaped the landscape of art—and what that legacy means for audiences today. This program is offered to accompany the ICA’s 90th anniversary of championing contemporary art and artists.
Make the most of your ICA visit! Enjoy a drink and light bite in the waterfront Wine + Coffee Bar before the program. Explore the galleries and re-visit Tony Oursler’s work afterwards.
About Tony Oursler
Tony Oursler conjures multimedia and immersive experiences which combine traditional art making tools with new technologies. He draws inspiration from wide ranging pop cultural phenomena including telecommunications, narrative evolution, conspiracy, social media, facial recognition, mysticism and environmental concerns. His works often take the form of a “palimpsest,” layering possible futures with the recent past while focusing on present day issues. As a pioneer of video art in early 1970s California and New York, Oursler developed a unique fusion of poetic free-association, stream of consciousness, dramaturgy and radical formal experimentation, employing painting, animation, montage and live action: “My early idea of what could be art for my generation was an exploded TV”. From performative and lo-fi beginnings to his high-tech environments of today, he holds an enduring fascination with the overlapping worlds of popular and subcultural activities and belief systems.
About Susan Goldberg
Susan Goldberg is President and CEO of GBH, the public media company in Boston that is the largest producer of multiplatform content for PBS, partner to NPR and PRX, and winner of the 2024 Oscar for Best Documentary for Frontline’s “20 Days in Mariupol.” Before assuming that role in 2022, she was Editor in Chief and Editorial Director of National Geographic, where she led the magazine to 11 National Magazine Awards, among other honors, over eight years. She was the Editor of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, the Executive Editor of the San Jose Mercury News, and has held editorial positions at Bloomberg News, USA Today, the Detroit Free Press and the Seattle Post-intelligencer. She was among the leaders of reporting honored with the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting at the Mercury News and has led work that was a finalist for the Pulitzer seven other times. Goldberg is a six-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize, a member of the PBS Board of Directors and President of the Board of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
About Meghan Clare Considine
Meghan Clare Considine is Curatorial Assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Art, where she has a special interest in projects engaging time-based media and performance. Prior to joining the ICA, she organized exhibitions at MASS MoCA and at the Weisman Art Museum. Considine holds a graduate degree from Williams College and Clark Art Institute Graduate Program in the History of Art. Her critical and scholarly writing has appeared in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Third Text Online, and in exhibition catalogues published by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and the ICA. Most recently, Considine was a selected participant in the international Curators Workshop of the 13th Berlin Biennial (2025) and was named a Museums Next Generation Laureate from Villa Albertine, the French Institute for Culture and Education (2026).
About Nora Burnett Abrams
Nora Burnett Abrams is the Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art. Nora joined the ICA in 2025 after a distinguished tenure leading the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. An accomplished museum leader and highly regarded curator, Nora has organized more than 40 exhibitions and is widely published. Prior to her time in Denver and Boston, Nora held roles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art and currently serves on the national board dedicated to advancing the museum field.
