Ruth Leavitt

Ruth Leavitt (1944–2025) was one of the first painters to treat the computer as a stretchable canvas. Born Ruth Sharon Hartman in St. Paul, she took her painting degree at the University of Minnesota in 1969 — studying under Peter Busa, which made her, as she put it, a "grand student" of Hans Hofmann — and in the mid-1970s, working in Minneapolis with her husband Jay Leavitt, a computer-science professor there, developed an interactive "stretching program" that treated a design like a rubber sheet: she pulled at a grid on screen, watched the composition deform in real time, and translated the results into serigraphs and paintings. She didn't write the code herself and didn't apologize for it — the machine was her medium, not her discipline. She edited Artist and Computer (Harmony Books, 1976), the era's defining anthology of artists working with computers, and later taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She died in Baltimore in January 2025.

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