![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/fleurs7.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tFitzgerald was at the vanguard of American artists critically engaging with television as a medium; she and John Sanborn were among the first artists to receive commissions from PBS and the BBC. Their celebrated collaboration, Interpolation<\/em> (1979), spliced everyday sounds and images into cacophonous clips, as if broadcast from network news in another dimension\u2014\u201dexaggerated and intensified with unsettling skill,\u201d according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which acquired the one-channel video in 2023.<\/p>\n \n\tHer body of video work resisted easy explanation. \u201cWhat is it about? There\u2019s no puzzle, there\u2019s no trick, it\u2019s about itself,\u201d she told MTV in 1982, ultimately describing the experience as an abstract symphony. As the New Yorker<\/em> once wrote, \u201cHer images are avant-garde painting of a high order.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTwenty years into the video movement, institutions had begun to take notice. \u201cVideo Art: A History\u201d opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1983, curated by Barbara London and featuring more than 250 artists, among them Fitzgerald. MoMA followed the seminal survey with \u201cThe Arts for Television\u201d in 1989, the first of its kind to examine television as a site of creative deconstruction. Sixty-seven artists presented videotapes\u2014encompassing literature, dance, music, theater, and more\u2014as alternative programming; Fitzgerald contributed To Sorrow<\/em> (1984) to the music section, alongside Laurie Anderson, Robert Longo, and Julie Hayward.<\/p>\n \n\tInspired by the writing of Thomas Hardy, with a score by Gordon, To Sorrow<\/em> was a meditation on humanity\u2019s self-isolation from nature. Its clips of the lush but lonely Irish pastoral landscape were sourced from another video performance, The Return of the Native<\/em>, and conveyed some of her cinematic signature: a tracking shot or slow focus from an unexpected vantage point, like a car window; a meticulous pan of shifting light at the far horizon.\u00a0At one point in To Sorrow<\/em>, horses amble towards the camera in a slow-motion sign of life.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cKit was a wonderful artist and a joyous person,\u201d Barbara London wrote online, sharing her condolences. <\/p>\n \n\tHer work, Gordon reflected, \u201cdoesn\u2019t superimpose artifact on top of the real thing. It\u2019s like having a conversation and you listen to what they have to say\u2014some people just talk over the conversation. Kit would listen.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFitzgerald\u2019s work was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, including twice in its biennial, and broadcast at institutions far beyond, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Gallery Watari, Tokyo; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. A Smith College graduate, she taught at Concordia College, where she created and led the New Media Communications and Digital Production undergraduate and graduate programs. Her work was distributed by New York\u2019s Electronic Arts Intermix.<\/p>\n \n\tShe is survived by her husband and their son, Max.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/kitz-fitzgerald-pioneering-video-artist-has-died-at-73-1234794643\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/fitzgerald-e1786727082439.png?w=1024″] Kit Fitzgerald, a visionary video artist with a sense for the music and motion of painting, died on August 3 at 73. The news was announced by her husband and longtime creative partner, Peter Gordon, on Instagram. He wrote that she \u201cfought a rare and aggressive cancer, but always maintained a sense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2095117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2095117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2095117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2095117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2095117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2095117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/to-sorrow-edited.png?w=400\")
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