From Deseret News archives:
Intersecting art — 40 years of Anna Campbell Bliss' work is on display at UMFA
Starting today, visitors to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts can experience and — if they take the time — understand exactly what Bliss meant. Her 40-year retrospective, "Intersections: The Art of Anna Campbell Bliss," stretches and stuns the imagination with expertly crafted art that intersects science, culture and history.
The exhibit is composed of Bliss' art from the time she moved to Salt Lake City in 1963 to recent site-specific work. Influenced by Euclidean geometry, Josef Albers' color theory, modern dance, Islamic calligraphy, water, Buckminster Fuller doodling, Navajo rugs, DNA and RNA, 13th-century illuminated manuscripts and just about anything else known to man, Bliss' exhibition pieces collide pleasurably with the eye: Color, line, positive and negative space, implied texture and movement all tantalize. Then, without any conscious effort on the viewers' part, the images meld into a cohesive design.
"I had to be somewhat selective concerning the pieces for the retrospective," Bliss said. "I tried to put the emphasis on the major areas: some sources of inspiration, the development of the color and then the site-specific work."
The beginning spaces of the exhibit allow her early color experiments, "Spectrum Study V" (1978) and "Spectrum Study VI" (1978), to strut with marvelous self-confidence. "The early prints particularly show the basic experimentation in color, mostly geometric," she said. "Then the prints move into a very free, experimental period. And then I move onto the computer."
Her "Nightshade II" (1993), where the artist employed cellophane for texture, is her best example of experimentation; the organic quality of the piece intrigues the eye.
Also in the prints area of the exhibition, visitors will encounter — side by side — "Chan Chan" (seven color screen print, 1981), Bliss' last B.C. (Before Computer) print, and "Mirage" (screenprint with airbrush, 1985) her first print to incorporate technology.
As scintillating as Bliss' use of color is, it is her love affair with the computer (generating algorithmic, rule-based art) that has produced the most exquisite and intelligent offspring: Viewers will see studies as well as completed works that span nearly 30 years.
In 1989 she was hired to do a mural about data processing for the state Capitol building. Bliss designed the mural on the computer and then merged the algorithmic result with her manual art skills, creating "Windows."
