Join us for an online discussion ‘Art Collecting. Digital Art’, programmed as part of LASER CYLAND — Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous.
Digital mixed-media artist Anne Spalter, art collectors Leonid Frants and Natalia Kolodzei will share their personal histories and perspectives on the passion of art collecting from painting to NFT-s focusing on the role of technology in the creative process and shaping art collecting trends.
Wednesday, July 20 at 12 PM (NYC). Find your timezone here.
Panelists: Anne Spalter (The Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection, NYC) and Leonid Frants (The Frants Family Collection, Miami), moderated by Natalia Kolodzei (Kolodzei Art Foundation).
SPEAKERS BIOS
Digital mixed-media artist Anne Spalter is an academic pioneer who founded the original digital fine arts courses at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s and authored the internationally taught textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999). Her artistic process explores imagery of the modern landscape. Spalter has drawn on the writings of Carl Jung as well as various science fiction novels and movies to develop a consistent set of personal symbols using a hybrid arsenal of traditional mark-making methods and innovative digital tools. She is currently creating crypto art, with works auctioned by Sotheby’s and Phillips, and featured in the New York Times. She recently completed a successful 501-piece drop entitled AI Spaceships.
Spalter is also noted for her large-scale public projects. MTA Arts commissioned Spalter to create a 52-screen digital art installation, New York Dreaming, which remained on view in one of its most crowded commuter hubs (Fulton Center) for just under a year. Spalter’s 2019 large-scale projects included a 47,000 square foot LED video work on the Hong Kong harbor.
Spalter’s work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY); the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI); The Museum of CryptoArt, and others. Alongside her studio practice, Spalter continues to lecture on digital art practice and theory and has been invited to participate in an alumni residency at MASS MoCA in 2022.
The Spalter digital art collection is one of the largest of its kind in North America with over 250 works by digital pioneers and innovators ranging from Vera Molnar and Manfred Mohr to Frieder Nake, George Nees, Ed Zajec, Ben Laposky and later artists such as Jean-Pierre Hébert, James Faure Walker, Corban Waker and Henry Mandell. The collection also includes several of the earliest computer animations, created by Ken Knowlton and his colleagues at Bell Labs. The Spalters have lent works to institutions ranging from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and MoMA in New York to the Daelim Contemporary Art Museum in South Korea and the deCordova Museum and Sculpture park in Lincoln, MA.
The Leonid and Anna Frants Family Collection focuses primarily on St. Petersburg art. Over time, the Frants collection grew to include numerous works of the first half of the 20th century, works from the post-war period, including many by nonconformist artists, as well as works by contemporary Russian artists. In addition to paintings and graphics, the collection also features installations, new media art, sculptures, mosaics, ceramics, and glassworks. The collection contains around 3,000 pieces, covers the extended period of time from the 1920s to the present, and includes a wide range of artistic styles and techniques. This makes it an invaluable resource for studying Leningrad/St. Petersburg art of the last 100 years.
Natalia Kolodzei, an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts, is a curator and art historian. Ms. Kolodzei is Executive Director of the Kolodzei Art Foundation (a US-based 501(c)(3) not-for-profit public foundation established in 1991), and, along with Tatiana Kolodzei, owner of the Kolodzei Collection of Eastern European Art, containing over 7,000 artworks (paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photography, kinetic and digital art) by over 300 artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Ms. Kolodzei has curated over eighty art exhibitions in the US, Europe and Russia. She is an author and editor of multiple publications and organized and contributed to symposiums and panel discussions for universities and museums worldwide, including co-chair Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) CYLAND Talks. In 2010 she was a member of Culture Sub-Working Group under the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission.