Anne Spalter

Anne Spalter makes landscapes in which familiar structures become strange. Highways, ships, cities and animals enter worlds shaped by digital transformation, often poised between catastrophe and renewal. Her images can be playful and intensely colored even when their subjects involve environmental collapse. This tension gives her speculative scenes their particular mixture of pleasure and unease.

Spalter studied mathematics and visual art at Brown University and earned an MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. In the 1990s she developed the first digital fine arts courses at both institutions. Her textbook The Computer in the Visual Arts (1999) brought technical and artistic questions together for a field still finding its place within art education.

Her move into digital practice grew from using a computer as a compact studio while working in New York. She later worked with Andy van Dam’s computer graphics research group at Brown, developing her understanding of the medium’s technical possibilities. Across her practice, digital tools extend decisions about composition, color and expression that also belong to painting.

AI offers a further way to generate and revise visual ideas. Her projects move between machine-generated imagery and work developed by hand, sometimes translating digital compositions into paintings, drawings or sculpture. AI Spaceships and Rabbit Takeover, both released in 2022, use imagined worlds to explore journeys, survival and transformation.

With Michael Spalter, she co-founded and stewards the Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection, which preserves historical computer art and lends to museums. This activity connects her contemporary practice to earlier generations of artists working with machines. Her own work is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, RISD Museum, Centre Pompidou and Buffalo AKG Art Museum.