DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

Filmmakers

I became intrigued by Arleen Schloss’ story and about how hundreds, if not thousands, of artists in various disciplines owed their success, in part, to Arleen. As I continued my research, I came to understand Arleen’s total output as an artist and how she is an art pioneer in so many different and overlapping disciplines. She typically embraced emerging forms and processes before they fully broke through, including performance art, spoken word art, video art, mail art, cyber art, lasers, and virtually any kind of technology that generated new possibilities.

I enjoy stories about underdogs and lesser known or wholly unknown, yet influential people. It’s A to Z: The Art of Arleen Schloss delves into New York City’s underground alternative art scene from the 1970s through the 1990s, from the point of view of the people who were there. I use footage that Arleen shot herself to document how life unfolded in her live/work loft in New York City, as well as her travels, performances, and on the street.

I met Arleen while working at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City in 1998. Nearly a decade later, in the summer of 2007, I approached Arleen about a documentary film project. From May 2007 to August 2007 we screened more than 600 hours of footage on VHS tapes of her work, including performances at A’s, at venues across the city and the world, and footage of trips and friends’ shows.

Over a 10-year period, I spent almost every weekend with Arleen viewing footage and ephemera, visiting museums and galleries, and asking questions about her voluminous archive. I interviewed over 60 people associated with the downtown art scene. Like many low budget documentary projects, this one had its fits and starts, and after more than a decade and a half, I’m proud to present a completed documentary.

— Stuart Ginsberg —

Stuart Ginsberg

Director, Producer, and Writer

Stuart makes his directorial debut with It’s A to Z: The Art of Arleen Schloss. He previously served as associate producer for two independent feature films. Followers (2000), the first of the two, received national distribution by Castle Hill Productions and he later served as the associate producer for Shockwave, Darkside (2014), an independent science fiction film.

An adjunct professor at Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media in Montclair, N.J, Stuart enjoys writing for and performing in storytelling and improv shows. He has performed at The Magnet Theater and the Greenwich Village Comedy Club in New York City. He began his career in public relations promoting independent films, TV specials, and Broadway shows and holds a B.A. from American University and an M.A. from The New School.

Victor Acevedo

Editor

Victor brings more than 15 years of experience as a video editor and documentary video director in the visual arts to the project. A desktop computer art pioneer, Victor has worked with digital media since 1983. His projects have evolved over time from traditional media to digital, and later, from still imagery to motion graphics. His personal oeuvre is focused on the production of Electronic Visual Music (EVM), a term he coined in 2013.

Acevedo’s digital fine art work has been featured in several books including, Digital Art (Wolf Lieser, Ullman /Tandem 2009), From Technological to Virtual Art (Frank Popper, MIT Press 2007), Art of the Digital Age (Bruce Wands,Thames and Hudson, 2006), and Escher's Legacy: A Centennial Celebration (edited by Doris Schattschneider and Michelle Emmer, Springer Verlag 2002). In 2019 the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art held a retrospective of Acevedo’s works of art and in 2022, he was included in the Techspressionism group exhibition at the Southampton Art Museum in Southampton, New York. He has made some of his work available in the cryptocurrency, NFT blockchain space.

Tobi Elkin

Associate Producer

A writer, editor, and adjunct professor at Montclair State University, Tobi has worked primarily as a business journalist and brings to the project a reporter’s curiosity, as well as an abiding interest in and appreciation for research and history. Tobi wrote, produced, and directed an award-winning short documentary, Train People in 2017 which was inspired by her participation in the Amtrak Writer's Residency in 2016. She also produced and directed a series of oral histories that documented the lives of older adults at the Henry Street Senior Center in New York City. Tobi currently works in marketing and teaches brand storytelling. She holds a B.A. from Goucher College and an M.A. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and studied at the Oral History Summer School.

Lorin Roser

Music

Lorin Roser is a multifaceted New York City-based musician, animator, painter, and multimedia artist. His animation work uses random manipulations to explore a world of hitherto unseen shapes and structural possibilities that meld music and form with the digital world. Lorin’s works are in the collections of major international museums, galleries, and archives, including the Museum of Modern Art, Otis Art Institute, the Chicago Art Institute Library, and the Franklin Furnace Archives.

Patrick Lichty

Producer

Patrick Lichty is a media artist, writer, curator, and designer of over 30 years. Born in Akron, Ohio in 1962, he was raised on art, technology, and science fiction. After getting his B.S. in Electronic Engineering and working in the discipline, he began an art and design studio in 1990, and created work for Accenture, Allstate Insurance, and the X-Prize.

As an activist and artist, Patrick was part of or worked with the collectives RTMark, Pocha Nostra, The Yes Men, Terminal Time, Second Front, Shared Universe, and Critical Art Ensemble, showing in the Venice and Whitney Bienniales. His writing on virtual reality, augmented reality, and media culture is widely published. Patrick served as Editor-in-Chief of the media arts journal Intelligent Agent for 10 years. The journal was published by Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Patrick lives in Winona, MN.

Stephan Bielecki

Producer

Stephan Bielecki is a versatile producer known for his work in both film and music videos. He is a co-founder of NYLA Projects, a production company based in Los Angeles. One of his latest projects include the documentary "The Greatest Love Story Never Told," offering a look at Jennifer Lopez's career and behind the scenes footage. Bielecki has contributed to the music industry, producing videos for popular artists like One Republic and Bella Poarch with production credits including "Niall Horan: No Judgement" and "Kill The Boyfriend."

SYNOPSIS

IT’S A to Z: The ART OF ARLEEN SCHLOSS is a feature-length documentary about Arleen Schloss, an underground artist, director, and curator who became an influential figure in the downtown New York art scene from the 1970s through the 1990s.

IT’S A to Z: The ART OF ARLEEN SCHLOSS explores Schloss’s creative work and evolution and how it changed over time. A highly original cross-disciplinary artist, Schloss was known for her boundary-pushing, idiosyncratic performance art, video, and installations.

Through exclusive never-before-seen archival footage shot by Schloss herself and mixed with commentary from people from the scene, we trace Schloss’s story and see, from her point of view, the texture of New York City's downtown art scene from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Known as an “artist’s artist,” Schloss became influential through A’s, her loft space that was a hub for genre-defying music, gallery shows, performance art, films, and other happenings. A hotbed of experimentation, A’s featured the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Bogosian, Glenn Branca, Kim Gordon, Shirin Neshat, Thurston Moore, Alan Suiclde, Ai Wei Wei, and John Zorn, among others.

In addition to the shows she curated at A’s and elsewhere, Schloss gained notice as a critically acclaimed performance artist in the 1970s. A New York Times critic once described her multimedia productions as “much superior to most performance art.” Her shows, along with A’s, established Schloss as a prolific connector who brought people together from both the underground and more mainstream creative communities.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Schloss became one of the first artists to integrate technology and lasers into her performance art. Schloss was frequently one of the first in a group of artists to integrate new technologies, including digital video into her projects. She evolved into a successful video artist and made inroads into other forms of digital media during the dotcom boom of the 1990s and early aughts.

Continually challenging herself to create no matter the prevailing conditions, Schloss remains a transformative figure and an inspiring force in the lives of many artists and creatives. She mentored and supported up-and-coming artists from all over the world through the 2010s.