Copper Giloth (first curator) — First SIGGRAPH Art Show

1981

Artists: Copper Giloth (first curator), Darcy Gerbarg (co-founder) · Year: 1981 · Medium: Annual juried art exhibition alongside the SIGGRAPH technical conference · Substrate: Exhibition of plotter prints, video works, computer animations, and installations · Place: Dallas, Texas, USA (SIGGRAPH 1981) · Institution: ACM SIGGRAPH conference The first SIGGRAPH Art Show was held in 1981 at SIGGRAPH in Dallas, organized principally by Copper Giloth and Darcy Gerbarg. It was the first juried art exhibition integrated into the major technical computer-graphics conference, and it established a venue that has run annually for more than forty years. Every year since 1981, computer artists have submitted work to the SIGGRAPH Art Show, a panel of jurors has selected a percentage of entries, and the selected works have been exhibited alongside the conference's technical papers and industrial exhibits. What the Art Show did institutionally was give practicing computer artists a reliable annual venue with international reach. Before 1981, artists showed at Ars Electronica (from 1979) or at scattered independent venues; after 1981, there was an additional year-after-year conference presence that technical staff of the field's major corporations and research labs would encounter directly. Bell Labs engineers, Pixar staff, Silicon Graphics developers — all of them walked the SIGGRAPH Art Show floor every year. The cross-pollination between art-side and engineering-side of the field flowed largely through this channel. The Art Show has also served as a continuous archive. SIGGRAPH's retrospective publications — particularly the ACM SIGGRAPH Art Show Archives — document virtually every year of computer art since 1981 at institutional scale. The selections are not canonical (the jurors change yearly, the editorial posture shifts) but the aggregate record is unmatched. The Art Show has continued through every year since 1981, including the virtual pandemic editions. It remains one of the field's most important continuous institutions. Lore Giloth and Gerbarg organized the first show on a tight budget with limited institutional support; SIGGRAPH leadership was skeptical initially about whether a technical conference should host an art exhibition. The success of the 1981 show — strong submissions, strong attendance — settled the question. Both women remain credited as founders in the SIGGRAPH historical record. The Art Show's catalogs from the 1980s and 1990s are now sought-after reference works. Sources • ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Archive (digitalartarchive.siggraph.org) • SIGGRAPH Art Show catalogs (annual, 1981–) • Giloth, Copper — essays in Leonardo