Mary Curtis Ratcliff

Mary Curtis Ratcliff was a founding member of Videofreex, the pioneering video collective formed in 1969 by Ratcliff, David Cort, Parry Teasdale, and others who used Sony Portapak cameras to document events, movements, and communities that broadcast television ignored. When Videofreex moved to Lanesville, New York in 1973 and launched Lanesville TV, Mary was part of the community that turned that experiment into a working local broadcast, transmitting directly to neighbors in the surrounding area and building one of the earliest models of community-controlled television in the country. Her visual art practice has continued independently, and her work has been exhibited widely.

Her place in the community media story is at the founding moment of the producer tradition: the discovery, made by a small group of people with portable equipment, that television could be made by and for the people it was about.