The films of multimedia artist Neelon Crawford have been out of circulation since his retirement from filmmaking in the mid-’80s. But before leaving the medium behind to focus on his successful career in fine-art photography and painting, Crawford produced a rich body of meditative, diaristic films that interrogate the moving-image phenomenon even while expressing a profound reverence for the beauties of the natural world. Several of Crawford’s works were featured in Cineprobe, The Museum of Moderrn Art’s prestigious experimental film showcase that ran from 1968 to 2002, and in 2016 the museum acquired the complete elements and prints of all 35 of his films, and began the work of digital preservation. The results of these efforts are now on view in curators Ron Magliozzi and Brittany Shaw’s exhibition and screening program Neelon Crawford, Filmmaker, which should hopefully re-establish Crawford’s well-deserved place in the avant-garde film canon.
Crawford’s ability to create dazzling abstractions through his deft framing and crystalline exposures should come as no surprise, considering the artist’s pedigree. Neelon’s father, the well-known painter Ralston Crawford, worked during the 1920s and ’30s in the “Precisionist” style—an American contribution to Modernism (1966), Crawford found a way to “marry what I was doing with stained glass and the movement of light with what I was already very familiar with in still photography.”
