Artists in Inventory

 

Artist Biography

Dortothy Simpson Krause is a painter, collage artist and printmaker who incorporates digital mixed media into her art. Her work is exhibited regularly in galleries and museums and featured in numerous current periodicals and books.

Krause is Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts College of Art where she founded the Computer Arts Center and a member of Digital Atelier®, an artists collaborative, with Bonny Lhotka and Karin Schminke. She is a frequent speaker at conferences and symposia and a consultant for manufacturers and distributors of products which may be used by fine artists.

In July 1997, Krause organized “Digital Atelier: A printmaking studio for the 21st century" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and was an artist-in-residence there for 21 days. For that work she and her colleagues received a Smithsonian/ Computerworld Technology in the Arts Award. That same year, she worked with a group of curators to help them envision the potential of digital printmaking in “Media for a New Millennium” a work-tank/ think-shop organized by the Vinalhaven Graphic Arts Foundation.

In 2000 Krause received a Kodak Innovator Award and in June 2001, with Digital Atelier, she demonstrated digital printmaking techniques at the opening of the Brooklyn Museum of Art 27th Print National, Digital: Printmaking Now. In 2007 she was Von Hess Visiting Artist at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Krause is the author of Book + Art: Handcrafting Artists' Books published by North Light in 2009 and co-author, with Lhotka and Schminke, of Digital Art Studio: Techniques for combining inkjet printing with traditional art materials, published by Watson-Guptill in 2004.

Artist Statement

I am a painter by training and collage-maker by nature who began my experimental printmaking with reprographic machines. Since being introduced to computers in the late 1960’s when working on my doctorate at Penn State, I have combined traditional and digital media. My work includes large scale mixed media pieces, artist books and book-like objects that bridge between these two forms. It embeds archetypal symbols and fragments of image and text in multiple layers of texture and meaning. It combines the humblest of materials, plaster, tar, wax and pigment, with the latest in technology to evoke the past and herald the future. My art-making is an integrated mode of inquiry that links concept and media in an ongoing dialogue - a visible means of exploring meaning.