Perry Bard


Perry Bard was a Canadian interdisciplinary artist. She worked with film, site-specific public art installation projects around the world, and on the Internet.
Many of her projects were collaborations with the public and selected communities. In 2011, her work, Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake was chosen for inclusion in Google's selected top creative uses of the Internet. In 2010 the project was named one of the Top 25 Videos for the Guggenheim Museum's YouTube Play Biennial of Creative Video. For the public participation project, Bard invited interpretations of Dziga Vertov's classic 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, through uploads to a web site where software designed for the project archives sequences and streams a new film daily on the site. "The viewer sees two concurrent sets of images on a single screen: Vertov's original film and the remake of it that has been constructed on the Internet." The film has been shown at the Moscow International Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, at the Transmediale Berlin and won awards at Ars Electronica, Liedts-Meesen, and Transitio_MX. The remade film "exists on the Web, at media festivals, and in the gallery and museum but also travels and is launched on outdoor public commons screens." Evelin Stermitz quotes Bard in an interview in Rhizome: "The primary idea was to use global input via the Internet to generate multiple versions of one film to be screened in public space and on the web."

Background

Bard was born in Quebec City, Canada in 1944. She died in New York City in January 2025.

Career

Bard created Status: Stolen, a public work focused on artifacts missing from Iraq's Baghdad Museum in 2005. A mobile truckside billboard depicting the missing artifacts traversed New York City for thirty days in June 2005. "Bard's itinerant billboard served as an aide-memoire, reminding us that military victory and cultural conquest go hand in hand." A number of magazine advertisements featuring the artifacts followed in issues of Art Journal in 2006.
She also often wrote for Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, and has curated a number of exhibitions in the United States and abroad.
Bard earned a B.A. at McGill University, and an M.F.A. degree at the San Francisco Art Institute. She pursued doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin where she completed all but a dissertation in French Theatre studies. She moved to New York City in 1983. Bard has taught graduate and undergraduate art for many years in New York at the School of Visual Arts and the Pratt institute.

Early work

  • The Times, an installation at Petrosino Park, New York City. Steel and mirror "roof," and the first paragraph of Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities painted backwards on the sidewalk referencing homelessness. Commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, 1992.
  • Back Seat Foot Arm Lead, an installation at P.S. 1. Twelve desk arms mounted on steel poles with typical desk chair cast in lead; slide projection of students' feet crossing and uncrossing at the foot of the chair, 1991.
  • Shelters and Other Spaces, an installation at the SculptureCenter in New York. Concrete blocks, rocks, slide projector with 81 pictures of temporary shelters on the streets of New York City projected onto glass "pillow" and cardboard shelter bought from Scott, who was living on the street.

Collaborative work

Later projects

Awards

Grants

Selected curated exhibitions