(Milwaukee, WI)  The Haggerty Museum of Art will present the exhibition The Search for a Personal Vision in Broadcast Television: Fred Barzyk from September 7 through December 2.  The exhibition opening at 6 p.m. on Friday, September 7 will feature a lecture by video artist, painter, and media critic Russell Connor at the Helfaer Theatre followed by a reception at the Haggerty Museum, both on the Marquette University campus.
The exhibition, curated by Haggerty Museum director Curtis L. Carter, will celebrate Fred Barzyk's contributions to the development of broadcast television and video art over the past forty years.  As the founder and first director of the WGBH New Television Workshop (1967-1979), Barzyk created an environment where the first generation of video artists, in conjunction with dancers, photographers and actors, expanded the creative boundaries of both broadcast television and video art by providing a platform for artists to work in a television studio, an environment that was for the most part inaccessable to artists during this time.
His collaborative projects have included work with Kurt Vonnegut, James Baldwin, Nam June Paik, the happenings of Allan Kaprow, Peter Campus, Bill Viola, William Wegman, Lilly Tomlin and other artists and actors.
Influenced by the work of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, Barzyk encouraged creativity not only with the artists involved in his projects, but also the engineers and technicians within the broadcast television industry.  As a producer and director for network television, he received numerous awards including two ACE awards, three national Emmy awards, and a Peabody Award for exceptional television dramas, documentaries and educational programs.
"This exhibition showcases Milwaukee native Fred Barzyk's internationally established work in television and video.  The exhibition is an imprtant document of the efforts of artists to challange the conventions of television and video and turn them into artistic mediums," says Haggerty Museum director Curtis L. Carter.
Three galleries of the Museum will be filled with video monitors showing Barzyk's projects, including interactive media, award-winning dramas, collaborations with video artists and dancers, and the first double channel television broadcast experiments with humorists Bob and Ray he produced in the mid-1960s.  Each will explore Barzyk's legacy as well as future directions for television and video art.
The exhibition will feature Video Commune: The Beatles From Beginning to End, a work produced in 1970 using Nam June Paik's first video synthesizer, a machine that transforms pre-recorded images into wholly abstract sequences; Peter Campus's Three Transitions video sculpture from 1973; the Haggerty Museum's Paik video sculpture Cage in Cage; a video dance TV wall installation featuring Trisha Brown, Louis Falco, Rudy Perez, and other modern dance choreographers; Whatís Happening, Mr. Silver, a 1967 television series that experimented with non-narrative, nontalk barrage by combining thirty video inputs, film clips, live action, purposely nonrelevant tapes, slides, photographs and abstract video images into a swirling collage; Lathe of Heaven, a science fiction drama adapted from the Ursula LaQuin novel; Countdown to Looking Glass, a program for HBO TV that dramatized a war game created for the U.S. Navy by an MIT professor; and interactive video displays including one that allows the viewer, through multiple video camera and monitor placement, to "climb through themselves."
TV-TV, an outdoor sculpture created by Barzyk and artist Daryl Myers showing an interpretive view of the life of television, will undergo daily alteration and transformation for the entire eighty-seven days of the exhibition.  A supplementary computer screen will run a continuous loop showing the entire life span of the sculpture.
The exhibition catalogue will feature a statement by Fred Barzyk and essays by Curtis L. Carter, director, Haggerty Museum; Barbara London, associate curator, Museum of Modern Art; Brian OíDoherty, painter, video artist, and former chairman of the NEA Media Arts Panel; Charles Johnson, novelist, short story writer, and essayist; George Fifield, director of Boston Cyberarts; and Mary Ides, WGBH archivist.
Special programs associated with the exhibition will include a monthly video series at the Haggerty Museum featuring Barzyk produced and directed works.
Thursday, September 13, 7 p.m.
Secrets (Starring Christian Slater and Milwaukee's own The Violent Femmes)
Tender Places (Starring Jean Stapleton)
Thursday, October 4, 7 p.m.
Phantom of the Open Hearth
Thursday, November 1, 7 p.m.
Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree (Written by Charles Johnson)
The Haggerty Museum will collaborate with the local Public Television station WMVS
for the broadcast of The Electronic Canvas, a Barzyk produced program highlighting the development of the video art movement in America.