Beverly Kleiber
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Artist Beverly Kleiber’s largest footprint of artistic expression is in the realm of digital and interactive art, as a pioneer at the nascent beginnings of the genre.
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The granddaughter of celebrated American western artist Hans Kleiber, Beverly’s legacy work and newest series Zoom Hallucinations finds her once again at the bleeding edge of the digital art world.
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Her early installations used the first computer/video technology and exhibited in art galleries and museums in San Francisco, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, Montreal, Tokyo, and New York.
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Decorated Franco-British art historian, technologist, cultural theorist, and curator Frank Popper discusses Kleiber’s work in his highly successful and critically acclaimed book Art in the Electronic Age. He references the artistic innovations of her interactive and digital creations.
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Microtimes, a ground-breaking computer publication of the early digital age, listed Kleiber as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the computer industry in 1995.
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Steve Wilson, in his 1995 book Information Arts--Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology described Kleiber’s (aka Reiser) interactive, computer-generated works as the exploration of “magical realism” and “new human possibilities.”
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Kleiber served as president of Ylem/ Artists Using Science and Technology for 14 years beginning in 1985, and from 1989 to 2000 sat on the Advisory Board of Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology.
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Her other works include neon sculpture, pastels and flat glass creations, some on a grand scale. Her neon sculpture was a central feature in the old Tropicana Casino in New Jersey. Her large stained glass creations anchored a pivotal architectural firm in Oakland and several large commercial properties and homes in California's greater Bay Area.
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Kleiber began her art education with BA studies with Corita Kent at Immaculate Heart College, culminating in an MA from San Francisco State University.
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Beverly chose the photographs of Dainis Hazners as the base layer of each montage.
All of them are of the Powder River Basin, Wyoming.
The Big Open: Photographs from the
Powder River Basin
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In 1880, the photographer L.A. Huffman used the phrase “The Big Open” to describe the landscape of what is now southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming. Much of that country remains unchanged. Thousands of acres of undeveloped lands exist there. The Powder River is the main waterway into which everything else flows.
The Powder River Basin, land drained by the Powder River and its many tributaries, occupies approximately 24,000 square miles.
A few ranchers live out there, and people working in the extractive industries (coal, oil, gas, coal-bed methane). But mostly that country is big, empty... and open.
I love to sit on some knoll, some rocky overlook at the edge of nowhere, nearing the back of beyond, and look out. It is unsentimental country -- austere, plain and unadorned. Great emptiness harbors deep peace.
Dainis Hazners