Aldo Tambellini
Reflections

Saturday, October 4, 2025, AT 2:30PM

Admission:
$15 general
$12 for MFA members and students

Harry and Mildred Remis Auditorium
(Auditorium 161)
MFA Boston
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115

RPM Festival and MFA Boston co-present a special screening program Aldo Tambellini: Reflections, honoring the renowned moving image artist Aldo Tambellini. Curated by Robert Harris, the event will take place at the Harry and Mildred Remis Auditorium on Saturday, October 4th at 2:30 PM.

Aldo Tambellini (1930–2020) was a profoundly original, daring, visionary pioneer, exploring projected light, paint, poetry, sculpture, video, and “electromedia” performance. A cultural activist committed to community, he worked collectively, and founded one of NY City’s earliest screening and performance spaces. For Tambellini, art was not a commodity for the elite, but, as he put it, “the vital energy of society.”

This program presents four significant works from different decades of Tambellini’s career: Moonblack (1969), Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn (1971–72), No Name Film (1969/2014), and The Royal Wedding (1981/2017). Moonblack and No Name Film reflect Tambellini’s deep engagement with the concept of black, which he saw as central to his spiritual, artistic, and social outlook. “Black,” he wrote in 1967, “is the expansion of consciousness in all directions.” Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and The Royal Wedding explore early video aesthetics and the possibilities of live broadcasting, using these new mediums to comment on social justice and amplify visions and voices often left unseen and unheard. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Robert Harris, a filmmaker, educator, and former curator with decades of experience in experimental and ethnographic film, and Hayden Guest, the Director of the Harvard Film Archive and Senior Lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies.

About Artist

Aldo Tambellini (1930–2020) was a pioneering artist, poet, and activist whose work spanned painting, sculpture, film, video art, and performance. Known for his radical experimentation and fusion of art and social justice, he helped shape the landscape of 20th-century media art. Central to his vision was the color black, symbolizing consciousness, trauma, space, and protest. From early “Lumagrams” and “Black Films” to immersive “Electromedia” performances, Tambellini’s work challenged artistic norms and addressed racial and political injustice. He co-founded influential venues like the Gate and Black Gate in New York and was a trailblazer in Expanded Cinema and early video art. Later, at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, he explored global communication through art, anticipating concepts akin to the internet. Rediscovered in the 2000s, Tambellini’s legacy remains vital as a catalyst for aesthetic and social transformation.

About Curator

Robert Harris is an educator, film-poet, and traveler. Currently a professor of film production at Fitchburg State University, he was formerly Curator of Video at Anthology Film Archives (NY) and PS#1 (Queens, NY), and Artistic Director of the New York State Summer School of the Arts: Media Arts. He has taught at the University of California, San Diego, Palomar College, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Ithaca College. He has assisted and collaborated with artists Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, and Aldo Tambellini. In 1977, he spent 9 months living with and filming the Arhuaco peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. His films have been shown in festivals, museums, and institutions throughout the world.

Moonblack

1969 | Digital scan of 16mm film | 16:30

In 1963, Tambellini took discarded 35mm slides and, using needles and other tools to scratch the emulsion, created spirals and other round forms, sometimes piercing holes through the transparencies. Seeking, as always, to incorporate his environment in his iconography, he projected these manipulated slides from his tenement rooftop in the Lower East Side onto the façade on a neighboring building. He then began to paint on glass mounts for slides, producing his “Lumagrams”. Thus was born his multimedia practice which he termed “Electromedia”. A few years later, Tambellini proceeded to use these techniques, burning, scratching and painting directly onto motion picture stock, beginning his Black Film Series (1965-69).

The Royal Wedding
(Part of a series on a Day in the Life of Television-TV about TV)
1981/2017 | ½” b&w video & NYSC Broadcast recording | 24:07

On July 29, 1981, the day of the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Diana, Aldo Tambellini recorded the broadcast as viewed by patrons of a small working-class diner in Central Square, Cambridge Massachusetts. Taking a team of students from MIT with cameras, a mixer, and a TV set (the diner did not have one), Aldo recorded the people eating and watching the wedding. The young waitress serving at the counter was soon to be married herself.

Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn

1971-72 | ½” b&w video| 25:00

In 1970, with a Sony Portapak, recording in B&W on ½” videotape, Tambellini observed and documented the streets beneath his Brooklyn loft windows above Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Ave. Shown initially on 3 monitors at the Kitchen and The Anthology Video Program, the material was reassembled in 2015 to exhibit as 6, floor-to-ceiling projections in a room.

No Name Film
1969/2014 | Digital remix of 16mm film | 18:50

Restlessly and voraciously creative, Tambellini constantly worked and reworked his art. The last phase of Tambellini’s career was engaged in reviving, re-editing, re-purposing, and exhibiting material generated decades earlier. No Name Film, The Royal Wedding, and Atlantic Avenue, each are resurrected films, assembled anew for contemporary screening.