Pop Goes The Easel: Paintboxed - Tezos World Tour at bitforms Gallery, NYC
Join us for an evening of art, conversation, and vintage computing at bitforms gallery on March 11th as we bring the Paintboxed - Tezos World Tour to New York City.
Pop Goes The Easel, presented by ArtMeta, Tezos Foundation, & bitforms gallery.
March 11th, 2025 | 6 - 9 PM
Discover the Paintbox’s huge influence on pop culture through an exhibition and panel discussion, complemented by the rare opportunity to use Adrian Wilson’s Paintbox first-hand. Vinciane Jones and Aleksandra Artamonovskaja from Trilitech will additionally be in attendance.
Pop Goes The Easel Panel | 7 PM
Moderated by Regina Harsanyi (Associate Curator, Museum of the Moving Image), the panel brings together Adrian Wilson (artist, Steward of the Quantel Archive), Marlene Weisman (artist, SNL in-house designer from 1988-1994), and Rory Trifon (president, Estate of Richard Bernstein) to explore the influence of the Paintbox on the genre of pop art.
Meet the Panelists
Adrian Wilson
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Adrian Wilson is a pioneering digital artist who, according to Alvy Ray Smith, was one of the first to specialize in photographic manipulation using a digital paint system. Over four decades, Wilson has built the world's largest archive of Quantel Paintboxes, ephemera and unseen 80s Paintbox art by David Hockney, Larry Rivers, Jennifer Bartlett, Sidney Nolan, and Howard Hodgkin. Exhibitions of Wilson's work span nearly 40 years, including at the Computer Arts Society, British Computer Society, Tate Modern and Cleveland Gallery. We are privileged to have Adrian give us exclusive access to his archive and have this OG artist show his rare, working $100,000 machine on the Paintboxed – Tezos World Tour.
Marlene Weisman
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Marlene Weisman is a Brooklyn-based artist and graphic designer whose innovative work spans mixed media, collage, and assemblage. Deeply influenced by the vibrant aesthetics of 1960s Pop Art, her creations explore themes of appropriation, transformation, pop history, and material culture. Weisman’s distinguished career includes a seven-season tenure as an in-house designer from 1988-1994 on Saturday Night Live. Weisman created some of the most iconic SNL images and graphics, including Wayne's World, with "Masters of the Paintbox" Doug Zider and Ira Rappaport.
Rory Trifon
Rory Trifon is the President of The Estate of Richard Bernstein. He formally established The Estate of Richard Bernstein in 2018 with the main purpose to perpetuate Bernstein’s artistic legacy through the preservation and circulation of his artwork and archives. The Estate works to exhibit his artworks and to be a source of accurate information about the life and work of Richard Bernstein.
Meet the Moderator
Regina Harsanyi
Regina Harsanyi is the Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Museum of the Moving Image. She also advises artist studios, art museums, galleries, auction houses, and private collectors on preventive conservation for variable media arts, from plastics to distributed ledger technologies. Harsanyi previously facilitated over 200 exhibitions with a creative technology focus as Director of Programming at Wallplay after working as a Registrar at Sotheby’s. She is a graduate of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, has taught at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia University, and lectures globally. Her most recent curatorial work includes the acclaimed exhibition Auriea Harvey: My Veins are the Wires, My Body is Your Keyboard (MoMI, 2024).
Meet the Quantel Paintbox
Introduced in 1981, Quantel's bespoke $250,000 Paintbox was an advanced, artist-friendly, broadcast-quality digital art and design studio so far ahead of its time that it took a decade for the competition to catch up. It became the global standard for TV graphics and revolutionized music videos. The 1985 photo-quality version of the Paintbox was so advanced that it outpaced Adobe, to the point that it was used to create advertisements for Photoshop—and remained in use by Andreas Gursky as late as 2010.
David Hockney created his first digital artworks on a Paintbox in 1985, and Keith Haring was so enamored with it that he flew to Rome just to use one, seven months before his passing. Designed to be invisible to both user and viewer, digital work created on the Paintbox was omnipresent on TV screens throughout the 1980s, visually defining the decade and laying the foundation for the digital era.
About the Paintboxed - Tezos World Tour
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The Paintboxed – Tezos World Tour is an international series of interactive events presented by ArtMeta and the Tezos Foundation, offering contemporary artists a rare opportunity to create new digital works on one of the few remaining Quantel Paintboxes while allowing visitors to engage with art history firsthand. Stopping in Miami, Paris, London, and New York before culminating in an expansive exhibition as part of The Digital Art Mile in Basel, Switzerland. Artworks created on the Paintbox during the tour will subsequently be minted as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain.
About ArtMeta
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Created by Georg Bak and Roger Haas, ArtMeta transforms a historic neighborhood into a vibrant mile dedicated exclusively to digital art. Showcasing the world’s leading artists, galleries and platforms. Attend mind-blowing exhibitions, conferences and events. Discover cutting-edge technologies and Web3 experiences. Connect and collect.