Colette Bangert

2019, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. Traces: Women and Abstraction in the 20th Century.

2018, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England. Chance and Control.

2017, Art House, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 50 Years of Women and Systems Art.

2017, RCM Galerie, Paris, France. Pioneers in Computer Art: Digital Art from the 1960s and 1970s.

2016, Kansas City Artists Coalition, Kansas City, Missouri. Alone and Together: Colette And Jeff Bangert A Retrospective.

2015, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago, Illinois. all.go.rhythm, four person exhibition of algorithmic art. ALL.GO.RHYTHM

2013, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. Then and Now: Women Artists in the Spencer Museum of Art.

2012, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. Cryptograph: An Exhibition for Alan Turing.

2008, Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Imaging by Numbers: A Historical View of the Computer Print.

2004, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. Women/Modern Art.

2002, Lawrence Art Center. Lawrence, Kansas. From The Garden Series: Work on Paper and Thread Pieces.

1998, SIGGRAPH '98, Orlando, Florida. 25 Year Art Exhibition Celebration, invited artist.

The early algorithmic drawings were primarily concerned with the drawn line and its location in the space of the drawing. In the early works, modeling and transforming of modular lines and their location in a recursively subdivided space often result in dense textures of lines throughout the pictorial space. Later works such as Dawn Study (1989) and Dawn's Leaf (1989) present empty space and areas of flat color as essential compositional elements. Recursive spatial division returns as a theme in the "mud crack" series Three A, Three B, and Three C of 2004, and the related print On the Ground (2005). Images such as AC2923 IAM=4 (2008) turn in a new direction, concerned with reduction of composition to basic elements, arrayed vertically. This compositional simplicity enters a new phase, a return to the horizontal lines of landscapes coupled with a diaphanous veils of color, in the prints from The Plains Series II (2012), the last digital works produced by the Bangerts.

1987, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Computers and Art, with book/catalog Digital Visions by curator Cynthia Goodman. Digital Visions: Computers and Art

1986, SIGGRAPH '86, Dallas, Texas. A Twenty Year Retrospective of Computer Art and traveling exhibition.

1984, Albrecht-Kemper Museum, St. Joseph, Missouri. Between Earth and Sky: A twenty-year painting survey.

1982, Lawrence Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri. Grass and other computer drawings, 1967–1982.

1981, Second SIGGRAPH Art Exhibition, Dallas, Texas. Traveled to Flavio Belli Gallery and Ontario College of Art.

1980, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago, Illinois. Art In-Art Out: Computer-Aided Graphics.

1980, Traveling Artmobile, Bucks County Community College, Newton, Pennsylvania. Computer Art Exhibition.

1977, Lowe Art Gallery, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. Computer Genesis: A Vision of the 70's.

1977, Womanhouse, Women's Caucus for Art, Los Angeles, California. Contemporary Issues: Works by Women on Paper.

1977, Sony Hall, Ginza, Tokyo, Japan. International Computer Art Exhibition.

1974, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, Canada. Le Musée Cybernétique, international exhibition.

1974, The Kitchen, New York City. Second International Computer Art Festival Exhibition.

1971, Mulvane Art Museum, Topeka, Kansas. Computer drawings.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Bangerts actively participated in a burgeoning culture of digital art presented in museum shows and traveling art shows and published and discussed in scholarly conferences and journals. Their computer-based methods and attitude towards their medium emerged within and were shared by a new generation of digital artists. Computer scientist Frank Dietrich's essay "Visual Intelligence: The First Decade of Computer Art (1965–1975)" locates the Bangerts' work within the cross-pollinating conversations and art production of this early period. If the earliest "computer art" was marked by geometric precision and pattern-making, created largely by artists without formal training—many were scientists or engineers, not a few were anonymous programmers—the following generation developed more "natural" forms and were frequently trained as artists. As art historian Grant Taylor has noted, "The symmetry and precision that gave 1960s computer art a mechanistic appearance shifted toward inexactness and disorder." Colette's studies of grass, transformed into algorithmic functions, became fields and prairies of computer-generated grass in the Land Lines series of the 1970s. In works like Large Landscape: Ochre & Black (1970), Grass Series (1979–1983), Circe's Window (1985) and Katie Series (1986–1987), modular elements such as lines, curves, and shapes were modified by affine transforms and blending algorithms and arranged by chance operations and spatial-ordering algorithms to produce abstract landscapes and naturalistic patterns. Art historian and artist Ruth Leavitt noted the influence of this approach on her own work.

During the 1970s, several museum shows included Colette and Jeff Bangert's work. It also figured in traveling art shows sponsored by professional organizations such as ACM and IEEE, and in scholarly conferences. The second edition of the art gallery in the ACM's Special Interest Group on Graphics, SIGGRAPH, in 1981 in Dallas, Texas, included their work, as did SIGGRAPH's 25th year anniversary show in 1998. Herbert Franke, a pioneer of computer graphics and digital art in Europe, published a gallery of the Bangerts' work in Angewandte Informatik, a scholarly journal of applied informatics.

1970, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri. New Directions in Media: Computer and Laser Art.

1970, Association for Computing Machinery, New York City. National Exhibition of Computer Art. First Prize. Cover of ACM Journal.

Beginning in 1967, Bangert's collaboration with her husband produced a series of "algorithmic drawings", which have been extensively documented and collected. The earliest work was created at the University of Kansas Computer Center in Lawrence, Kansas, and output to a plotter, the Draft-O-Matic. Colette's signature "CB" signaled the collaborative nature of their work. Seeking out the Bangerts at the University of Kansas in 1968, sculptor Robert Mallary described their collaboration as a process whereby Jeff as a programmer "enabled the computer to plot endless simulations of the kinds of drawings and paintings that Colette was creating by hand in her studio." Software allowed them "to explore the relationships between algorithmically defined numerical functions and the drawing."

1966, Mulvane Art Museum, Topeka, Kansas. Recent paintings.

Her first New York City solo show, of work in traditional media, took place at the Krasner Gallery in 1963 and was reviewed in ARTnews and Arts Magazine—in the latter, notably, by Donald Judd—and mentioned in Time magazine and the New York Times. By the 1970s the Bangert's work was appearing in numerous art shows of computer-generated art, including the 1970 art show the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), presented in New York City for its 25th annual conference. There the Bangert's work was awarded first prize. Times art critic John Canaday found the work "appealing" in its "sensitivity," but dismissed the attempt to model the artist's hand drawn line as facile and lacking the essential qualities of Bangert's work in other media.

1963, Krasner Gallery, New York City. Recent paintings.

Colette Bangert attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, from 1948 to 1952. In 1952 she enrolled at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, where she majored in painting and lithography and graduated with a BFA in 1957. She earned an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Boston University (1958). In Boston she met Charles Bangert, then a student in Mathematics at Harvard University. They married in 1959.

Colette Stuebe Bangert (born 1934, Columbus, Ohio) is an American artist and new media artist who has created both computer-generated and traditional artworks. Her computer-generated artworks are the product of a decades-long collaboration with her husband, Charles Jeffries "Jeff" Bangert (1938–2019), a mathematician and computer graphics programmer. Bangert's work in traditional media includes painting, drawing, watercolor and textiles.