Margot Lovejoy

Margot Lovejoy was born in 1930, in a small town in New Brunswick, Canada. She pursued advanced art studies at the Beaux Arts in Paris and later at the St. Martin’s School of Art in London. After marrying physicist Derek Lovejoy, she balanced family life with her artistic career while living in Ottawa and abroad, including a period in Egypt, before settling in New York City in 1966. Throughout this time, she worked as a freelance illustrator and developed her teaching career at Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, and later at SUNY Purchase, where she became the first tenured female professor in the printmaking department.

Lovejoy’s artistic practice evolved from printmaking and photography into pioneering experiments with electronic media during the 1980s. Fascinated by the impact of technology on art, she incorporated video, installation, and internet-based projects into her work. Her research culminated in Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age 2004, which traces the historical and theoretical development of digital art as a transformative cultural force. Through projects like Parthenia and TURNS, she explored themes such as domestic violence, social justice, and personal narrative, using digital platforms to encourage audience participation and collective storytelling.

Over her career, Lovejoy received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987 and an Arts International Grant in 1994 for work in India. Her work was exhibited internationally, including solo shows at the Alternative Museum, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens Museum of Art, and Neuberger Museum of Art. Parthenia is archived by the Walker Art Center, and TURNS was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. She also authored several visual books, such as Labyrinth in 1991 and The Book of Plagues in 1995, and was a respected educator and speaker on the intersections of art and technology until her passing in 2019.