Member presale starts Wed, Sep 9 at 11 AM. Nonmember tickets available on Wed, Sep 16 at 11 AM.

What does access to art look like? Today, anyone with an internet connection can explore art from around the world in seconds. But long before streaming and social media transformed how we can experience culture, a collaboration in Boston was already imagining a new way to bring contemporary art into people’s homes.  

Beginning in 1983, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) partnered with WGBH’s New Television Workshop and a group of artists to launch the Contemporary Art Television Fund (CAT Fund). Their goal was bold: commission and co-produce experimental video art and support its distribution, including broadcasting it directly to living rooms. The CAT Fund challenged expectations—expanding both the possibilities of the medium and the meaning of access.  

Join us for a conversation revisiting this pivotal moment in contemporary art and Boston’s key role in the history of video art, while exploring current debates around public broadcasting and cultural access. This discussion features pioneering video artist and former MassArt faculty Tony Oursler, Susan Goldberg, president of GBH, and Meghan Clare Considine, ICA Curatorial Assistant, and moderated by Nora Burnett Abrams, ICA’s Ellen Matilda Poss Director. Together, they’ll explore how artists, institutions, and public media reshaped the landscape of art—and what that legacy means for audiences today. This program is offered to accompany the ICA’s 90th anniversary of championing contemporary art and artists.