Andrea Callard
Andrea Callard is an artist working in digital media and on paper. Her early work looked at nature in the city and its soundscape. How we live in our landscapes remains a central preoccupation. She has spent a decade photographing Freshkills Park. New York City dumped its waste in Freshkills for fifty years. Transforming it into a huge city park will take 30 years.
Callard’s early Super 8mm films and videos were preserved with generous support from the National Film Preservation Fund, New York Women in Film & Television, the Fales Library & Special Collections and the Moving Image Archiving Program (MIAP) at New York University. Galleries, museums, and festivals around the world screened the results. These include Equenas Historias da Vanguarda across Brazil, Downtown NYC, Ambulante across Mexico, DOXA, The Maysles Cinema, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, The 7th and 10th Orphans Film Symposium, and the 56th Oberhausen Short Film Festival among others.
A memory of her early films led to Callard making industrial videos for Green Planet 21, an innovative Western recycling company. From 2008 to 2019, Callard documented and promoted industrial recycling and sustainability initiatives. She produced over 120 industrial videos as well as websites and other digital media for sales and advertising.
In 2013, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC presented the XFR STN, an exhibition for media archiving in public, including members of Collaborative Projects, Inc. (COLAB). The following fall, with a small group of media archivists, Callard developed an effort that became the XFR Collective, Inc. The XFR Collective lowers the barriers to archiving services for artists and activists at a modest cost. You can watch 400 videos digitized from obsolete formats at https://archive.org/details/xfrcollective
In 1980, Callard organized the lobby of The Times Square Show, a seminal exhibition by COLAB and affiliates. She photographed the show and many publishers including Phaidon, The Whitney Museum, Artforum, Magazin, and others use them to illustrate works of art history.
Callard and Jolie Stahl initiated The Avocet Portfolio in 1985. Avocet published 48 editions of screenprints by 33 artists using non-toxic, water-based inks. (2023)
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