Courtesy of ArtForum

Charles Mattox

Charles Mattox (1910–1996) lived through most of American modernism on his way to the plotter. Born in Bronson, Kansas, he ground pigments for Diego Rivera — joining the Radio City mural team, as it happened, the very day Rivera was fired from it — taught drawing at the California School of Fine Arts and later at UC Berkeley, and showed kinetic sculpture in the Los Angeles orbit of the Ferus Gallery. Machines with motion and sound were his subject long before computers: pendulum drawing machines, buzzing kinetic constructions. In 1968 he joined the University of New Mexico, where he instigated two of the earliest art-making programs written for artists rather than programmers: ART1, developed with colleague Richard Williams for line-printer output on the university's IBM 360, and DART1, which he commissioned David Caulkins to write for a CalComp drum plotter. He lectured on art and science until retiring in 1976 and died at home in Albuquerque in April 1996. The V&A holds twenty of his plotter drawings and prints; SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art also hold his work.

Artist's website (sfmoma.org) ↗

1 physical work