Screening: Herb & Dorothy
VIEW EVENT DETAILS*This program is full-house.
Registration 06:15PM
Screening 06:30PM
Herb & Dorothy
(2008 / Japan / Dir. Megumi Sasaki / 87 minutes/ English)
Herb & Dorothy tells the story of Herbert Vogel, a postal clerk, and Dorothy Vogel, a librarian, who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history with very modest means. In the early 1960s, when very little attention was paid to Minimalist and Conceptual Art, Herb and Dorothy Vogel quietly began purchasing the works of unknown artists. Devoting all of Herb's salary to purchasing art they liked, and living on Dorothy's paycheck alone, they collected artworks guided by two rules: each piece had to be affordable, and it had to be small enough to fit in their one bedroom Manhattan apartment. Within these limitations, they proved themselves to be curatorial visionaries; most of the artists they supported and befriended went on to become world-renowned, including Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Lynda Benglis, Pat Steir, Robert Barry, Lucio Pozzi, and Lawrence Weiner. After thirty years of meticulous collecting, the Vogels managed to accumulate over 2,000 pieces, filling every corner of their tiny one bedroom apartment.
Director Megumi Sasaki, born and raised in Japan, has lived in New York City since 1988. Originally a freelance journalist, Megumi's first big break came in 1989 as she covered the fall of the Berlin Wall. After a 3-month period taking photographs and gathering stories directly from the streets and living rooms of Eastern Europe, Megumi produced a 10-part series portraying the confusion and excitement gripping the lives of people from former Iron Curtain nations. In 2002, Megumi founded the production company Fine Line Media to streamline ongoing commitments to Japanese TV while facilitating her new interest in feature documentary projects. Herb & Dorothy is the first of these, a labor of love both directed and produced by Megumi.
Asia Society Hong Kong Center is a Program Partner for
‘Sites of Construction’ Screening Programme presented by Asia Art Archive
‘Sites of Construction’ is financially supported by the Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme of
the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The content of these programs does not reflect the views of
the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.