LeRoy White, an early adopter of digital art-making, died
unexpectedly on February 28, 2007. He was 71 years old, and taught
at the Rhode Island School of Design (USA) for over 40 years.
With a history of exhibitions in sculpture and conceptual art, LeRoy
began investigating digital imaging in the mid-1980s. At the Rhode
Island School of Design, he was director of the IBM/RISD Fine Arts
Imaging Research Project, focusing on how issues of composition and
design could be explored with the computer.
White exhibited and spoke about his digital images in the first and
second Arts and Technology Symposia held at Connecticut College 1986
and 1989 (curated by Cynthia Beth Rubin and David Smalley), and was
included in the 1986 exhibition on the Artist and the Computer in
Louisville (curated by Roberta Williams), the 1987 exhibition
"Hypergraphics VIII" and several other early digital imaging
exhibitions.
Working with his colleague Bert Beaver, he organized the first
digital imaging exhibition in Rhode Island in 1988, at the Bannister
Gallery of Rhode Island College. Through this exhibition and his
teaching efforts, LeRoy was instrumental in bringing the new field of
computer art to a large number of colleagues, and paved the way for
the integration of computers into the sphere of fine art.
At the time of his death, LeRoy White was working on a series of
digital photographs, subtly manipulated and masterfully printed in
his own studio. His digital photographs are in the collections of
the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, the Rhode Island
School of Design Art Museum, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at
Cornell University, and the Dayton Art Institute. He was a graduate
of the University of Dayton and the Rochester Institute of Technology.
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