Darcy Gerbarg

Darcy Gerbarg grew up in Hurley and Kingston, New York. She took painting lessons in Woodstock with local artists before pursuing formal training at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture under Mercedes Matter. She also studied printmaking in New York, working across etching, serigraphy, and monoprinting, which gave her a technical foundation for translating images across mediums. She earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and later an MBA from New York University, pairing her formal art education with business studies. For more than four decades she has maintained a studio in Chelsea while also working in the Catskill Mountains close to where she was raised. Alongside her artistic practice, Gerbarg has held academic and leadership roles including Senior Research Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information beginning in 1997 and Executive Director of the Marconi Society at Columbia’s School of Engineering from 2002 to 2006. She also served as editor of a Springer book series on the economics of information, communication, and entertainment, extending her work into technology and policy.

Gerbarg began as an Abstract Expressionist painter, making large color field canvases in New York in the early 1970s before turning to computers at the end of the decade. In 1979 she began experimenting with digital imaging at NYIT and MAGI SynthaVision, working at a time when 3D computer graphics were first being developed. She approached the computer as a painter’s tool, using early paint systems to build images one stroke at a time and focusing on speed, color control, and visual complexity. Since output devices did not exist at the time, she sought ways to translate her digital images into physical form, producing silkscreens, projections, and ceramic tiles from computer-generated designs. In 1984 her 3D animation Raffles City was distributed internationally, marking one of the earliest instances of an artist’s work entering the new medium of computer animation. As technology advanced she continued to integrate each generation of tools, from digital printmaking and large-format canvas to AR and VR environments. At the Future Reality Lab at NYU she created three-dimensional light sculptures in virtual space, cropping and refining them into canvases and interactive installations.

Gerbarg is one of the first artists to present computer-based work in museum contexts, with her debut exhibition at the Downey Museum of Art in California in 1981. She went on to show in major survey exhibitions such as Electra at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1983, Computers and Art at the Everson Museum in 1987, and Infinite Illusions at the Smithsonian Institution in 1990. Over the following decades her practice appeared in institutions including the Bronx Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Siemens Museum in Munich, and the Computer Museum in Boston, as well as at international fairs in Basel, Cannes, Paris, and Miami. In parallel with her artistic practice, she played a central role in shaping the field of computer art education, teaching the first computer art course for artists at New York University in 1980, directing the inaugural SIGGRAPH Art Shows in 1981 and 1982, and founding the world’s first MFA program in Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts in New York in the mid-1980s.