Pioneering the Digital Art Frontier: LACMA's Initiative to Spotlight Female Artists

LACMA has championed Digital Art since the museum's early days, beginning with the museum's visionary Art and Technology Program, which ran from 1967 to 1971. The initiative paired 70 artists, including Walter de Maria, Dan Flavin, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, with major corporations to facilitate interdisciplinary experimentation. Though the program was groundbreaking in its encouragement of artists to experiment with new technologies and take purposeful risks, its inaugural cohort of artists were all men. In 2014, LACMA launched the Art+ Technology Lab, which continues in the spirit of experimentation and collaboration, and is committed to supporting a diverse roster of artists and range of art practices. 

LACMA's collections of digital art reveal a diverse history, with major works by new media pioneers like Joan Jonas, Mariko Mori, Michael Noll, Nam June Paik, Diana Thater, and Stan Van Der Beek and an emergent generation of innovators including Sarah Rosalena Brady, Petra Cortright, Krysten Cunningham, Cao Fei, Cayetano Ferrer, Victoria Fu, John Gerrard, Camille Henrot and Jennifer Steinkamp. LACMA's programming also reflects its commitment to digital innovation. In recent years, the museum presented Rain Room (2015-17), an immersive installation that offered the seemingly impossible ability to control rain; Diana Thater's major mid-career survey Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination (2016); a virtual reality exploration of immigrants and refugees in Alejandro G. lnarritu: CARNE y ARENA (Virtually present, Physically invisible) (2017); the first survey of art that conveyed the illusion of three dimensions in 30:  Double Vision (2018); John Gerrard's Solar Reserve (2018), a digital simulation of a solar thermal power plant; Christian Marclay's Sound Stories (2019), which featured immersive audiovisual installations made with Snapchat videos; and LACMA x Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives, an ongoing partnership with Snapchat that supports artists in creating augmented reality lenses to reimagine monuments in the 21st century.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announced 2022 that it has launched a new fund to support the acquisition of digital artworks by women artists, an initiative spearheaded by philanthropist and entrepreneur Paris Hilton. This is the first acquisition fund Hilton has established for an art museum, as well as the first fund created at LACMA for digital art and among the first to focus on art by women. 

Digital art has been an integral part of LACMA's collections and programming since the 1960s. Building on the museum's collection and programmatic strengths, this new acquisition fund intends to support diverse artist practices, including work with artificial intelligence, augmented reality, animation, graphics, multi-media installation, photography, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), performance, software, sound, and video art. With this support, LACMA curators working with photography, digital media, and contemporary art will be empowered to examine and study digital innovation from around the world. As an encyclopedic art museum situated in the capital of digital, technological, and scientific innovation, LACMA will also be better positioned to continue sharing digital art with the widest array of audiences. 

 "We are grateful to Paris Hilton for her initiative to bring more digital art by women artists into our collection," said LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan. "LACMA has always been interested in experimentation and risk-taking in art, and this initiative will help the museum-and Los Angeles-continue to evolve into an important center for digital art." 

Together with the launch of the fund, two artworks have been acquired for LACMA's permanent collection including Continuum: Los Angeles (2022), a generous gift from Canadian-Korean artist Krista Kim (b. 1976), and The Question (2022) by British artist Shantell Martin (b. 1980). Continuum: Los Angeles depicts a vibrant color gradient that evolves over a 40-minute loop. Kim drew her source imagery from Los Angeles's skies and collaborated with composer Ligovsko·1 on the work's original sound (other editions of Continuum feature music composed by Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Jeff Schroeder). In The Question Martin uses digital technologies to engage drawing. Both works explore digital technology's effects on human perception and interaction, and will be included in a forthcoming exhibition examining digital innovation by women artists from LACMA's collection, co-presented by LACMA and Arizona State University in the fall of 2022 at the ASU Media and lmmersive eXperience (MIX) Center and the ASU Art Museum. "As an activist and entrepreneur who likes to push the boundaries in many male­ dominated fields, I immediately identified the need to support women in Web3," said Hilton. "There are so many incredibly brilliant and creative women innovators in the space." 

"An exploration of digital artists' creativity is critical as experience is increasingly digitized in the 21st century," said Dhyandra Lawson, Assistant Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at LACMA, and Celia Yang, Head of Director's Strategic Initiatives, Asia. "We are grateful to Paris Hilton for establishing an acquisition fund, which supports the museum's scholarship and promotes the practice of women artists."