An empty museum, with real art on the nonexistent walls...Imagine that!
An empty museum, with real art on the nonexistent walls...Imagine that!
Starting with a Doctorate in Fine Arts from Yale, Jonathan Reeve Price created conceptual art and concrete poetry, showing in galleries and museums in New York. He helped launch the Association of Artist-Run Galleries, to support artists creating their own spaces. But he quit the art world to join Apple, where the introduction of MacPaint was, for him, a life-changing event.
He spent many years coaching content creators and their managers in high tech companies in Silicon Valley and Japan. Along the way, he published more than 30 books on computers, digital art, and technical communication. He now returns to art with pixels on his brain. He explores NASA pictures of the sun, LandSat Orbiter images of rivers on Earth, and U.S. Geological Survey topographical studies of our liquid border, the Rio Grande. Get in touch at jprice@swcp.com
I work on an iMac, using a wide range of software to explore the data reflected in images such as NASA pictures of the sun, LandSat Orbiter images of rivers on Earth, and U.S. Geological Survey topographical studies of our liquid border, the Rio Grande.
I love the data. All those stacks of zeroes and ones add up to individual pixels, like dots of paint on a canvas, ready to be manipulated, distorted, shifted, and transformed. As I explore these artificial representations of the physical world, I get to view the scene up close, then far away; I soar to 30,000 feet, and then I wade through the reeds.
As I zoom in and out through so many levels, I carve paths through the imaginary space, to lead attention on. My goal is to bring out the patterns in the natural landscape, and the odd unnatural beauty of its digital representations. I want to give our eyes the pleasure of repeated visual tours, and, along the way, to lighten our spirits with tiny beautiful sparks.
These days I am exploring the liquid border—the imaginary line drawn down the middle of the Rio Grande as it passes between Texas and Mexico. Real, but invisible, the border floats away. But what pain comes across that unmarked frontier, what desperation, what determination! Exploring the photos and satellite data of this mighty river may help us imagine the people struggling across the river, and the trackers from the Border Patrol waiting on the American side.
Living next to the Rio Grande, I feel an affinity with other rivers, such as the Connecticut, the Ebro, the Ganges, even the Nile as it escapes the Aswan Dam. I remix the satellite data. I look back at what real painters have done.
I distort the original, useful, scientific image, taking it apart and rebuilding it with half a dozen applications, just to see what I can make out of the bitmaps, vectors, color palettes, and the spray of code. I struggle with the counterpoint of paint and pixel, the contrast between the prose label and the visual detail, the interaction between what we know and what we see. My prints are markers on the trail, not final destinations.
Acequia, Los Ranchos Town Hall, Los Ranchos, NM.
Alphabet in the Spectrum of the Rainbow, West Broadway Gallery, NY.
Balloon Poems, Cooper Union, New York, NY.
Canvas Photos, Verle II Gallery, Hartford, CT.
Edible I Ching, Soho Gallery, New York, NY.
Flophouse Follies, with Joel Katz. Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.
I Ching on the West Side Highway, 18th to 23rd Streets, New York, NY, West Broadway Gallery, New York, NY.
Liquid Border, Gallery with a Cause, Albuquerque, NM.
Paste Ups, West Broadway Gallery, New York, NY.
Rio Grande: Wetlands/Borderlands, Open Space Center, Albuquerque, NM.
311 Gallery, Raleigh, NC.
Art League Rhode Island, Providence, RI.
Avant-Garde Festival, New York, NY.
Boston Visual Artists’ Union, Boston, Massachusetts.
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.
Cade Art Gallery, Anne Arundel Community College, Arnold, MD
Farmington Museum, Farmington, NM.
Fort Works Art, Fort Worth, TX.
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, NY.
Henry Hicks Gallery, Brooklyn, New York.
Kensington Arts Association, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Librije Beeldende Kunst, Utrecht, Holland.
Loeb Student Center, New York University, New York, NY.
Mississippi State University Art Gallery, MS.
Museum of Parc Mont Royal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
New Mexico Art League, Albuquerque, NM.
Pleiades Gallery, New York, NY.
Richmond Museum, Norfolk, VA.
Sangre de Cristo Arts Center, Pueblo, CO.
Site: Brooklyn, Brooklyn, NY.
Center of the Arts, Tubac, AZ.
West Broadway Gallery, New York, NY.
Whitney Counterweight,. Soho, NY.
Women’s Caucus of Colorado, Lakewood, CO.
Seventeen pieces from The Liquid Border set have been taken for the permanent collections of the Albuquerque Museum, and the Rumsey Map Collection of Stanford University.
Other works have appeared in group shows at the Farmington Museum (NM), the Jewish Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, in New York.
American Artist
Art News
Artists Review Art
Arts Magazine
Christian Science Monitor
Kirkus Reviews
New York Magazine
New York Times
Soho Weekly News
The Nation
Village Voice
Women Artists’ Newsletter
Here are some anthologies with my (mostly) concrete poetry.
Sounds and Silences, Poetry for Now, edited by Richard Peck, Delacorte, and Dell Books, New York, 1970
Imaged Words and Worded Images, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, New York, NY, 1970.
Future Fictions, Panache, Princeton, NJ, 1971.
In Youth, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, Ballantine Books, New York, 1972.
Concrete is Not Always Hard, edited by A. Barbara Pilon, Xerox Educational Publications, Middletown, Connecticut, 1972.
Contemporary Poetry in America, edited by Miller Williams, Random House, NY, 1973.
Media Mix, edited by Alec Allinson, Beverley Allinson, and John McInnes, Thomas Nelson and Sons, Don Mills, Ontario, 1973.
Visual Literature Criticism: A New Collection, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, IL, 1979.
Literature of Work, Edited by Sheila E, Murphy, John G. Sperling, and John D. Murphy, University of Phoenix Press, Phoenix, Az, 1991.
The Poetry of Business Life: An Anthology, edited by Ralph Windle, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, CA 1994.
Essaying Essays: Alternative Forms of Exposition, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, Out of London Press, New York, NY, 2012.
· Blog: http://museumzero.blogspot.com/
· Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/JonathanReevePrice
· Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/jonathanprice
· Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
· Instagram: JonathanReevePrice
· Web: Www.webwritingthatworks.com
· Remapping Paris: A Museum Zero Exhibition, from The Communication Circle.
· Get Past the Tags: How to Write (and Read) XML, from The Communication Circle.
· Digital Imaging: The Official HP Guide, a Dummies Guide, with Lisa Price, from Wiley.
· Hot Text—Web Writing that Works! With Lisa Price, New Riders/Peachpit Pearson.
· Video Visions: A Medium Discovers Itself. New American Library.
· The Best Thing on TV: Commercials. Viking Press, Penguin Books.
· Life Show: How to See Theater in Life and Life in Theater, with John Lahr. Viking Press and Penguin Books.
