Claudia Hart is a trans-media artist who has worked between painting and simulation for four decades. Trained in art and architectural history at NYU and Columbia, she is self-taught in both painting and technology. She calls herself a trad artist: the work has always been in dialogue with art history.
Hart painted for twelve years in the East Village, showing with Pat Hearn, and afterward in Europe. In 1996, at the Berlinale, she saw Toy Story and went home to learn 3D simulation. Over the following two decades she became a pioneer of virtual imaging, making animations, augmented reality and motion-captured performances that borrow the voices of the patriarchs — philosophers, poets and painters — and invert their rationalism into something fantastical and dark.
She returned to painting in 2020, after twenty-odd years, by way of the machine. Working with master-printer Cody Renaldo, she developed the Ghost Paintings: panels hand-painted in gouache and ink, over which a UV printer — a CNC router that sprays pigment rather than cuts — lays a simulation modeled in Maya. The hand comes first, the machine last.
Hart works as an archivist, of her own endlessly versioned oeuvre and of what the canon discarded. The Armory Women (2022–23) recovers painters shown at the 1913 Armory Show and later erased from the market. Where she once spoke in the patriarchs' voices, here she paints in theirs.
Hart's work is held by the Whitney, MoMA, the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Albertina. She is Professor Emerita at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received the 2026 ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award.
Long Bio
Claudia Hart is a trans-media artist who has worked between painting and simulation for four decades. Trained in art and architectural history at New York University and Columbia, she is self-taught in both painting and technology. She calls herself a “trad artist” because the work has always been in dialogue with art history.
Hart painted for twelve years in the East Village, showing with Pat Hearn, and afterward in Europe. She lived in Germany in the years following the fall of the Wall, where she made A Child's Machiavelli (1995–98), a first-grade primer on how to obtain power — an oil painting exhibition at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, that became a a small catalog, which she to the Frankfurt Book Fair to be ultimately published by Penguin. Dr. Faustie's Guide to Real Estate Development followed in 1996. Both turn on classical allusion, the working method she has kept since: canonical material used as common property, familiar enough that the reader arrives already knowing the story.
In 1996, at the Berlinale, she saw Toy Story and enamored of the form, she returned to the United States to learn 3D simulation. Over the following two decades she became a pioneer of virtual imaging, working in animation, augmented reality, motion capture and staged performance. Entering a field with almost no women in it, she took the tactic of speaking in the voices of the patriarchs — philosophers, poets, architects, painters — appropriating the rationalist aesthetics of the Western canon and inverting them into something fantastical, theatrical and dark. Works including The Alices Walking (2014), made with composer Edmund Campion, The Flower Matrix and The Dolls build immersive environments out of pattern, which she uses as fantasy's basic unit and as a structure that repeats, like narrative itself.
Hart works as an archivist. She mines her own oeuvre the way she mines any other cultural material, at a deliberate distance from it, treating older work as found rather than owned. The Memory Theaters of Claudia Hart (2022–23) began as a demo for an AI version of her personal history and ended as live analog performance. The First Circle Archive, made with media historian Natasha Chuk, documents thirty-one pioneers of digital art. Because digital work is fluid and endlessly revisable, she dates it by version rather than by completion — a practice she adopted on the advice of a Whitney curator, and one that treats each state as current rather than superseded.
She returned to painting in 2020, after twenty-odd years, by way of the machine. Working with master-printer Cody Renaldo at the Color Center in Brooklyn, she developed the Ghost Paintings: wood panels hand-painted in gouache, Bombay ink and traditional materials, over which a computer-controlled UV printer — a CNC router that sprays pigment rather than cuts — lays a simulation modeled in Maya. The hand comes first, the machine last. Three bodies of work have followed: The Ruins, Russian Roulette, and The Armory Women (2022–23), which recovers painters shown at the 1913 Armory Show and later erased from the canon as the market consolidated around their male contemporaries. Where Hart once spoke in the patriarchs' voices, here she paints in the voices of the women.
Hart's work is held by the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Albertina, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Thoma Foundation; the Spalter and Sandor collections; the New York Public Library; the Addison Gallery of American Art; and the Francisco Carolinum, Linz, where her retrospective Patterns and Politics was shown from August 27, 2025 to February 9, 2026. In 2026 two installations were commissioned for Pixel Pioneers at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, and she received the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. She was Professor in Film, Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2007 to 2023, and is now Professor Emerita.