Please join us for a online talk by the artist Anne Spalter

Location: The [DIAP] Zoom Room

Thursday April 23rd

Time 10:30AM – 11:30AM

The presentation is free and open to the public.

To attend and receive login information please RSVP to diap@ccny.cuny.edu

Digital mixed-media artist Anne Spalter is an academic pioneer who founded the original digital fine arts programs at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s. With a decades-long goal of integrating art and technology, Spalter has authored over a dozen academic papers and the seminal, internationally taught textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999). Alongside her studio practice, Spalter continues to lecture on digital art practice and theory. She is on the Digital Art Acquisitions Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Spalter’s work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY); the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI); and others. Her artistic process employs a hybrid arsenal of traditional mark-making methods and innovative digital tools. A new body of work, further developed at a Winter 2019 residency at MASS MoCA, combines artificial intelligence image algorithms with oil paint and pastels.

Having studied mathematics as a Brown undergraduate prior to her Painting MFA from RISD—and with additional cross-disciplinary masteries including a 2010 black belt and 2011 Sensei designation in Kenpo Karate—Spalter’s eclectic influences in the studio are as diverse as Buddhist art, Jungian archetypes, Surrealism, and pure mathematics. Spalter’s classical arts education combined with her foundational command of digital art theory suited her well when she transitioned from academia to a full-time studio practice in 2009.

For the digital art component of her mixed media practice, Spalter uses custom software and algorithms to transform both still and video source footage—which she captures in high resolution during multisensory experiences such as riding the Coney Island Cyclone; walking through an open-air flower market in Bangkok; and gazing down from a helicopter over downtown Dubai—into psychedelic, vibrantly rendered “Modern Landscapes.”

Spalter is also noted for her large-scale public projects. MTA Arts commissioned Spalter to create a 52-screen digital art installation, New York Dreaming, which remained on view in one of its most crowded commuter hubs (Fulton Center) for just under a year. Spalter’s 2019 large-scale projects included a 47,000 square foot LED video work on the Hong Kong harbor.