Mark Wilson 

 Introduction

During the nineteen seventies, Mark Wilson actively exhibited paintings and drawings in New York. His work was deeply involved with geometric imagery that had a distinctly technological flavor. In 1980, Wilson purchased a microcomputer and began to learn programming, with the goal of creating artworks. This work has continued, and his computer generated works have been widely exhibited, both in the U.S. and in Europe. He participated in many of the most influential exhibitions of computer art; including seven SIGGRAPH art shows, "Computers and Art" at the IBM Gallery in New York City, "ArtWare" at the Hannover CeBit, and Nokia's Gallerie Atelier E in Z rich. The Victoria and Albert Museum included his work in the 2010 exhibition, Digital Pioneers. Putnam published his book, Drawing with Computers, of which Scientific American remarked, "...perhaps the path no one quite knows toward the new art we hope for one day." In 1995 he published "Lines:Vectors", an edition of laser prints. "Vectors:Textures" was published in 1997.  More recently, Wilson has been working on a series of images using a large format archival printer.

The National Endowment for the Arts awarded Wilson an Artists' Fellowship in 1982, and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts has given him three grants. Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, awarded Wilson the Distinction in Computer Graphics in 1992. He has taught, lectured, and has been visiting artist at a number of institutions including the University of California at Santa Barbara, Yale, Carnegie-Mellon, and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Wilson's works are in numerous public, corporate, and private collections. Among them are the Chemical Bank, IBM Corporation, Apple Computer, UniSys Corporation, United Technologies, Mobil Oil, Prudential Insurance, Ziff-Davis Publishing, Block Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Victoria and Albert Museum, Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Sao Paulo, Buffalo AKG Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Johnson, and Ivan Karp.

Born in Oregon in 1943, his undergraduate work was done at Pomona College. At the Yale School of Art, he studied painting with Jack Tworkov and Al Held, and received an M.F.A. in 1967. He lived in New York City for three years and then moved to West Cornwall, Connecticut. Today he lives in West Cornwall and Neskowin, Oregon. He is married to Pamela Pray Wilson. They have three grown sons.