Godard, Jefferson

Video art collector and gallerist, Jefferson Godard talks about how he came to have such a commitment to the medium of video art, and also explains the intricacies of owning, viewing, marketing and selling art in this ever evolving genre.

“Video art is an avant-garde medium and I think that collectors are, for the most part, afraid of it. It’s a shame because the work is a wonderfully open medium… it’s much more democratic. The intellectual qualities of video are often much more tangible than other genres.”

Jefferson Godard received an MA in Architecture from Dessau Institute of Architecture at the Bauhaus, and is a committed collector of contemporary video art. Godard has served in such prestigious positions as Chairman of VERGE and Acquisition Director of EMERGE at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, he was a panelist at the Moving Image Video Art Fair in New York, and he holds a faculty position at Columbia College Chicago. Godard has curated a number of exhibitions of video art around the world and opened his own gallery, Aspect Ratio in Chicago, with prompt reviews from Time Out Chicago and Artforum.