Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films is a unique anthology of American artists’ films and videotapes made in the 1960s and 1970s. The anthology was assembled for distribution by the pioneering New York dealers Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend in the early 1970s, and was run by Nina Sundell and Joyce Nereaux, based in a loft on Greene Street, Soho.

Castelli and Sonnabend were responding to a strong engagement with film and video by a new generation of post-Minimalist artists that included Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Ed Ruscha, Robert Morris, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain, Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, Joan Jonas, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and William Wegman, among others. Castelli also commissioned several films and videotapes, which were premiered at the gallery.

A distribution catalogue of the films and videotapes was published, with entries on each work. Distribution continued until the early 1990s. Some of the videotapes and films are now distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York, and Video Databank, Chicago.

Since 1998, with the agreement of both Leo Castelli and Ileanna Sonnabend, the Whitney Museum has been re-assembing Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films as a special collection within the museum’s permanent collection. This ongoing project includes the conservation of many works that have not been shown since the 1970s, including Robert Morris’s films and Claes Oldenburg’s Happenings films.

Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films encompasses many of the most influential film and video works of the 1960s and 70s. The re-constitution of this unique group is retrieving many works not seen since that period, and re-inserting them into the dialogue of contemporary art. 

From 1963 through 1968 Andy Warhol produced nearly 650 films, including hundreds of silent Screen Tests, or portrait films, and dozens of full-length movies, in styles ranging from minimalist avant-garde to commercial “sexploitation.”

The Andy Warhol Film Project began in the 1980s when the Whitney Museum and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) agreed to collaborate on the largest archival research project in the history of American avant-garde cinema: to catalogue Warhol’s massive film collection, investigate its history, and preserve and re-release all of the films in conjunction with a program of scholarly research and publication. Learn more