In Conversation with Susan Mogul

Join us for an engaging conversation with pioneering video artist Susan Mogul, who will discuss her 1997 video I Stare at You and Dream, featured in AGG’s exhibition Do You Remember Love, as well as her wider practice. Known for intertwining autobiography with documentary strategies, Mogul’s work often explores themes of family, relationships, and identity through a deeply personal lens.

Filmed in Mogul’s Highland Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, a predominantly working-class Latino area, I Stare at You and Dream follows the intersecting lives of four individuals: Mogul herself; her friend, Rosie Sanchez; Rosie’s teenage daughter, Alejandra (Alex) Sanchez; and Ray Aguilar, Mogul’s on-and-off boyfriend. The narrative is intimate, intertwining familial and romantic relationships to explore how personal history shapes the present, inviting us to consider questions of women’s identity, family dynamics, and the search for a sense of home.

Susan Mogul has been involved with video since the early 1970s, creating a foundational body of humorous and staunchly feminist performance videos before expanding into experimental narratives, including feature-length work. Her numerous accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and an ITVS commission. Her work has been showcased internationally, with a survey of her videos held at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna in 2024, and her first solo museum exhibition at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw in 2022. Other notable exhibitions include California Video at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles: Birth of an Art Capital at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Where Art Might Happen: The Early Years of CalArts at the Kunsthaus Graz.

Mogul’s work has also been discussed in X-TRA (2020), where “A Feminist’s Survival Index” reviews her current work within the context of feminist art history. Her career and contributions are further explored in Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, where a chapter is devoted to her impactful legacy.

Susan Mogul, I Stare at You and Dream (production still), 1997, video, 56:40 mins. Video: Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago