Copper Frances Giloth
“I started watching people who watch stuff, watching people who were taking pictures of art— and began piecing them together.
I realized this was an extension of what I was doing in graduate school and afterwards—the process of piecing things together to make a story.”
Mother-Daughter-BIOGrids #3, 2011. Courtesy of Copper Giloth. From New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts.
Copper Frances Giloth is an award-winning digital media artist whose work has been featured in international festivals, galleries, and museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA); the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA); and ACM SIGGRAPH. In 1980, Giloth became the first master of fine arts candidate and woman to graduate from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In 1982, Giloth chaired the first ACM SIGGRAPH juried public exhibition of experimental two-dimensional, three-dimensional interactive, and time-based works by artists and scientists. In 1985, Giloth and Jane Veeder co-authored “The Paint Problem,” an influential essay on issues around the future of artists’ digital tools. Giloth is a Professor Emeritus of Art, University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also served as Director of Academic Computing in the Office of Information Technologies for 21 years. Recent exhibitions include: Microscope Gallery.
Barbara Crane, Ruth Duckworth, Jeanne Dunning, Lee Godie, Ellen Lanyon, Kay Rosen, Holis Sigler, Diane Simpson, Margaret Wharton, and Margaret Whitehead are among women artists featured in the MCA’s Art in Chicago: 1945–1995, whose works influenced Chicago’s evolving arts community.
Head 6, 1989, Jeanne Dunning
30” x 19” Vintage cibachrome on plexiglas
From the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection