Exploring the concept of “modern landscape” through art and technology

Anne Spalter is an acclaimed American digital mixed-media artist whose artworks explore the concept of “modern landscape” through both the subject matter and artistic approach. She is particularly interested in integrating art and technology in the study of form, color, and composition. Her most recent work combines artificial intelligence algorithms with oil paintings and pastels.

In her rich artistic œuvre, Spalter draws on her personal digital photographic and video database to create both traditional artworks and new media pieces, often merging conventional artistic techniques and innovative digital tools. These personal symbols include pathways such as highways and bridges, modes of transportation such as planes, ships, and UFOs, bodies of water from oceans to swimming pools, and urban landscapes with skyscrapers. The compositions are often based on circles and spheres and use patterning to create geometric order, while the palette mainly consists of sunset, sunrise, or twilight lighting and colors. The works have simultaneous physical and spiritual references, acting as both objective landscapes and tools for inner exploration.

Spalter is also an academic pioneer who founded and taught the first digital fine arts courses at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s. She is the author of the internationally taught textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999). Her art, teaching, and writing reflect Spalter’s persistent goal of integrating art and technology.

Spalter studied painting at The Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate but transferred to Brown University in her junior year and graduated with a degree in Mathematics. She returned to RISD to pursue an MFA a few years later. She worked at Brown in the Computer Science department’s Graphics Research Group for many years as a visual researcher and artist-in-residence. Since 2009, she has been working as a full-time artist showing at galleries and art fairs and creating large-scale installation works. Her notable large-scale public installation projects include a 52-screen digital art installation “New York Dreaming” in Fulton Center, and a 47,000 square foot LED video work on the Hong Kong harbor.

Spalter is a co-curator of The Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection, one of the world’s largest private collections of early computer art. The collection has loaned work to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her own digital mixed media artworks are included in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, RI, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and The Museum of Crypto Art.

She works from Anne Spalter Studios in Providence, Rhode Island; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and Brattleboro, Vermont. Alongside her studio practice, Spalter continues to lecture on digital art practice and theory.