Margot Lovejoy

Margot Lovejoy is a digital artist and historian of art and technology. She is Professor Emerita of Visual Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase. She is the author of Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age. Lovejoy is recipient of a 1987^[1] Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1994 Arts International Grant in India.

Her website "Parthenia" has been archived by the Walker Art Center as part adaweb.com and her website "TURNS" was featured in the 2002 Whitney Museum Biennial.

Digital Currents

In her best known historic work, Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age,^[2] Lovejoy follows on the research of Frank Popper, Jack Burnham, and Gene Youngblood by documenting the historical record of the relationship between technology and art as culminating in digital art. Lovejoy recounts the early histories of electronic media for art making (video, computer art, the Internet) by providing a context for the works of major artists in each media, describing their projects, and discussing the issues and theoretical implications of each to create a foundation for understanding this developing field of digital art.

In Digital Currents she explores the growing impact of digital technologies on aesthetic experience and examines the major changes taking place in the role of the artist as social communicator. She demonstrates that just as the rise of photographic techniques in the mid-19th century shattered traditional views about representation, so too have contemporary electronic tools catalyzed new perspectives on art, affecting the way artists see, think, and work, and the ways in which their productions are distributed and communicated.

Publications

• Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age
• Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media
• Labyrinth (1991)
• The Book of Plagues (1995)
• Paradoxic mutations
• Manifestations

Awards

• 1987: Guggenheim Fellowship^[1]
• 1994: Arts International Grant, India

Solo exhibitions

• Alternative Museum, New York
• P.S.#1 Contemporary Art Center, New York
• Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, New York
• Queens Museum of Art, New York
• Neuberger Museum of Art, New York
• Stamford Museum, New York
• Islip Museum, New York

Collections

Lovejoy's work is held in the following collections:

• Museum of Modern Art
• Getty Institute
• Neuberger Museum

References

• Christiane Paul, Digital Art, Thames & Hudson, London, p. 219