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ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Juan Downey was a Chilean artist best known for his pioneering video art installations and performances during the 1970s and 1980s. Trained as an architect in Santiago, Downey moved to Europe and lived in Paris during the early 1960s. In the mid-1960s, he moved to Washington D.C., and then to New York City in 1967, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He was closely involved in video and performance art circles in lower Manhattan, particularly the Raindance Collective and those involved in the seminal arts and technology periodical Radical Software. Downey was a fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual studies in 1973 and 1975, and received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. He had solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. For his best-known project, Video Trans Americas (1973-1977), Downey traveled extensively throughout Central and South America and created interactive videos with those he met along his travels. (Sarah Montross, 2014)