Digital Prints

New Mexico artist Ursula Freer has a traditional art background, but seven years ago she
went all-digital. “It has totally changed my way of creating art,” she says. “The medium
is quite amazing; there seems to be no end to the possibilities for creative expression and
great freedom for communicating ideas.”
In her studio, Freer works with digital photos taken with her digital camera, software and
filters, and also what she calls “screen painting” by using a digital graphics tablet. She produces
her own inkjet prints on fine-art paper, and she markets them through galleries and
her website. In addition, Freer has started to do digital art photography and printing for
other artists in her local area.
Gaining Ground: A Question of Acceptance
Artists have been criticized for adopting new technologies since they first rubbed colored
dirt on the walls of the caves at Lascaux, France. Oil-on-canvas was considered heresy by
the tempera-on-wood-panel crowd in the mid-1400s. Photography was blasted as a perversion
in the early 19th century. The same with lithography. And it is no different with
digital technology, which many photographer-artists—the true opportunists that they
are—have readily adopted.
While the digital printing boom includes everyone from aging Baby Boomers who are creating
family photo prints in their home offices to professional artists selling fine-art prints
through galleries, it is the latter group who are pushing the edges of print quality, durability,
and acceptability. However, it has not been an easy road to gain the public’s and the
art community’s acceptance. First attempts at digital printing were crude and focused on
the technology itself. But art typically expands to absorb new technologies, and after the
initial, giddy, “look what I can do” phase, photographers and artists have evolved to the
point of focusing on a true artistic goal: moving us with their images.
A seminal event on the path to digital acceptance was the printmaking artist-in-residency,
Digital Atelier: A Printmaking Studio for the 21st Century, at the National Museum of
American Art of the Smithsonian Institution (now the Smithsonian American Art
Museum) in Washington, D.C., which ran for three weeks in 1997 (see Figure 1.3). All
five founding members of Unique Editions (Dorothy Simpson Krause, Karin Schminke,
Bonny Lhotka, Helen Golden, and the late Judith Moncrieff) were present, and this was
probably the first time the public got to interact with computers in a workshop setting at
a major museum (this event is now part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian).
Krause, Schminke, and Lhotka would go on to be Digital Atelier, the well-known printmaking
collective (see more about them in Chapter 11).
Another watershed event marking the art world’s acceptance of digital art was when the
Brooklyn Museum of Art staged its Digital: Printmaking Now exhibition that ran from
June through August, 2001. The second largest art museum in the U.S. put a huge stamp
of approval on digitally created art.
Digital prints (primarily inkjets) are now part of the permanent collections of New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of
American Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of
Chicago. Even the Louvre, The Musee D’Orsay, the Hermitage, both National Galleries
Chapter 1 ■ Navigating the Digital Landscape 25