Recording the Ride: The Rise of Street-Style Skate Videos
About Museum of the Moving Image
Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) is the only museum in the U.S. that explores the central technology of the present moment. Screens are all around us. We use them to educate, entertain, and communicate. The moving image—encompassing film, television, video games, and other forms of digital media—shapes how we see and feel the world. With exhibitions and screenings on the art, history, technique, and science of the moving image, MoMI presents the real and imagined worlds of our past, present, and future. With ground-breaking education programs, digital literacy initiatives, and cutting-edge media labs, MoMI is not just a museum but also a place where we can all make sense of the forces and experiences that create our shared reality. MoMI is an open world in the heart of both Astoria, NYC, and our entire creative community.
Photo by Thanassi Karageorgiou
About Recording the Ride: The Rise of Street-Style Skate Videos
Recording the Ride: The Rise of Street-Style Skate Videos is an exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image that was organized by guest curators Jacob Rosenberg and Michaela Ternasky-Holland, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs Barbara Miller, and Director of Exhibition Management and Design Dánae Colomer.
The exhibit explores the late 1980s and 1990s, and how skateboard teams harnessed inexpensive, widely accessible video equipment to record and share limit-pushing tricks performed on stairs, benches, and other skate-able elements of public architecture.
These high-energy VHS-format videos, shot with limited budgets on consumer-accessible cameras equipped with genre-defining fish-eye lenses, were circulated among skaters and sold in skate shops. They served as inspiration and instruction, a form of proto social media that bound together an avid, expanding skater community. Soon, skating and the way it was captured on video became inextricably linked, complementary forms of artistic expression.
Role: Guest Curator & Co-Designer
