Joan Shogren

Joan Shogren was born on July 5, 1932, in Mount Vernon, Washington. She studied chemistry at San José State University, graduating in the early 1950s, and remained there as secretary in the Chemistry Department. Alongside her administrative work she pursued a wide range of creative activities. She worked as a professional photographer from her high school years into the 1970s, installing a darkroom in her home and exhibiting locally. She was involved in the university’s experimental New College program and worked as a graphic designer for South Bay businesses including Camera One Theatre and Eulipia Restaurant. She also produced collages, assemblages, and sculptures that drew on subjects from science and mathematics. Outside of her professional practice she developed a lifelong interest in origami, producing geometric constructions and teaching adult education classes.

In 1963 Joan Shogren proposed a project at San José State University to test whether a computer could generate images when programmed with basic artistic rules. In discussion with graduate student Jim Larson she outlined principles such as proportion, balance, and center of interest, which Larson and assistant professor Ralph Fessenden programmed into the IBM 1620. The computer produced grids of numbers, described at the time as resembling an “income tax table,” which were then translated into shapes and colors and painted onto canvases by students. The works were, in her words, “very crude, primitive.” Though executed in paint on canvas, the process was conceptually grounded in computation. She argued that what the computer produced came out as material to be interpreted visually rather than finished work defined by the machine. IBM subsequently commissioned Shogren to create computer artwork for display in a San Jose office.

In 1984 Shogren, together with designer Mike Mathis and illustrator Dennis Fregger, was contracted by the software company T/Maker to produce clip art for the Apple Macintosh. She was selected for the project through her prior experience in computer art and design. Working with prototype Macintosh computers under nondisclosure, she created black-and-white bitmap images drawn pixel by pixel. The first package, ClickArt Publications, was followed by a series of sets covering business graphics, holiday symbols, personal and religious imagery, and decorative motifs. These were among the first digital image libraries available for personal computing and were later acquired by Broderbund.

The results of the 1963 project were shown at the Spartan Bookstore at San José State on May 6, an exhibition later identified by art historian Paul Brown as the first recorded public display of computer-generated art. Shogren’s later role in the development of ClickArt extended her contribution to the history of digital imagery, and her work has since been documented in institutional archives including ZKM and COMPART, the Computer History Museum, as well as in Judith Brodsky’s Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit, 2021. Shogren passed away in 2020.