“Anne Morgan Spalter creates art works that explore her concept of the “modern landscape.” The works depict modern landscape elements or ways of viewing our surroundings and use traditional materials as well as digital imaging, printing, and video.

Spalter takes hundreds of digital photos and videos each year, often from the windows of moving cars and planes, that capture both technologically advanced ways of moving through the landscape and the modern structures that are in it, from the geometry of the highway to radio and control towers.

Using her digital database as a visual resource, Spalter identifies scenes that are objectively compelling and also speak to her own internal emotions. She uses image-editing and video special effects software to create compositions from combinations of still and moving material and then makes (often large-scale) charcoal, pastel and graphite drawings. The hands-on traditional mark–making experience lets her explore the images and related ideas in a visceral and physical way impossible on the computer.

When the drawings are completed, Spalter returns to the digital realm, capturing the drawings as a high-resolution file and using a wide variety of software to further refine the work. With the computer she can apply image processing algorithms, edit compositions and create video.

The final works, whether traditional drawings or digital pieces, fuse inner and outer landscapes by combining traditional observation and representational imagery with expressive line and color. Spalter’s modern landscapes are neither idealized nor critical—they seek to share emotional states and to increase viewers’ awareness of their surroundings when they return to their daily life.

Spalter began her undergraduate education at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and then transferred to Brown University from which she graduated as a triple major in Visual Art, Mathematics and an interdisciplinary Independent Concentration. Spalter later returned to RISD where she received her MFA in painting. She created and taught the first fine art digital media courses at both The Rhode Island School of Design and Brown Unviersity.

Spalter’s book, The Computer in the Visual Arts, has become a standard reference text throughout the world used at over a hundred universities with established digital art programs. Roger Mandle, former RISD President, described Spalter’s book as, “a seductively articulate and illuminating introduction to the rapidly expanding world of the computer and art, design, and animation… Her book will become an essential textbook for art school curricula as well as a standard source for media-wise artists.”

Spalter’s art, writings and contributions to the field have led to her participation on a number of prestigious committees, juries and advisory boards. She was a long-time member of the Advisory Board of the Digital Art Museum, and has also served on the editorial board of the Journal of Mathematics and Art, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art Committee, among others.

A pioneering voice for the artist in the digital age, she worked with world-renowned Brown University Professor Andries van Dam to launch a large-scale initiative teaching digital visual literacy. Spalter’s research on color theory has also been cited in journals and books. Spalter has lectured around the world and in 2010 was invited to speak at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and at her alma mater, RISD. As a hybrid traditional/digital artist, Spalter’s work is included in leading contemporary collections in New York, Paris, Geneva, Singapore, Boston and Providence, RI.

She and her husband have established the largest collection of early computer art in North America. Works from the Anne and Michael Spalter Collection have been displayed throughout the world and were on view at the MoMA in the show “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century.” In February 2011, the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA opened an exhibit curated from the collection. Spalter also is a martial artist who recently received her black belt in Kenpo Karate.

She is represented by the Stephan Stoyanov/Luxe Gallery in New York City, Catherine Rubin in Paris, and Candita Clayton in RI." [Spalter, 2011]