Mary Rasmussen
“In the art community, there was this notion that artists are lone creatures. I never wanted to be the solitary artist. Anything I would’ve done by myself would not have been as interesting.”
Maxed-Out, 1992. Courtesy of Mary Rasmussen.
From New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts.
Mary Rasmussen is a new media artist and bio-visualization specialist. As a graduate student, she was part of a team that developed soft-ware to aid in the location of missing children. In 1989, Rasmussen graduated with an MFA from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and joined the faculty of the Biomedical Visualization Department at UIC. She developed and taught the department’s first computer classes for medical illustrators and sculptors.
In 1997, she founded the Virtual Reality in Medicine Laboratory (VRMedLab) at UIC. She led collaborative teams of surgeons, medical specialists, computer scientists, and artists to create networked virtual reality applications for educational and clinical use, and she developed the grants that provided the VRMedLab’s public and private funding. She led teams that received the Dr. Frank Netter Award for Special Contributions to Medical Education in 1998 and 2007.
HERSTORY: Digital Innovations Symposium & Book Signing NCSA, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, October 26, 2018
“Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, students at our sister campus at the University of Illinois at Urbana, sent us a copy of their new graphical web browser called Mosaic. It was amazing. I will never forget it. We installed it on one of our Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) machines because it could only run on Unix. I remember thinking this was something that was so elegant and clearly transformative.”
–Mary Rasmussen
Evolution II, 1984, Nancy Burson
7”x7” Vintage gelatin silver print
From the Richard and Ellen Sandor Family Collection