Her computer-generated artworks are the product of a decades-long collaboration with her husband, Charles Jeffries "Jeff" Bangert (1938–2019), a mathematician and computer graphics programmer.
Bangert's work in traditional media includes painting, drawing, watercolor and textiles.
In 1952 she enrolled at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, where she majored in painting and lithography and graduated with a BFA in 1957.
[citation needed] Early in her career, before her work in digital media, Bangert's paintings and drawings received critical attention.
The algorithmic methods she and her husband developed for creating digital prints arose from her practice of drawing and in turn influenced her work in traditional art media.
[2] The midwestern landscape of North America permeates her work, though it may simply be evoked by the treatment of lines and the organization of space.
Lines and space can be analyzed, described, and generated by programming code: In her collaboration with Jeff, the computer extended their understanding of "what a drawing about landscape can be.
[3] Beginning in 1967, Bangert's collaboration with her husband produced a series of "algorithmic drawings", which have been extensively documented and collected.
[5] Seeking out the Bangerts at the University of Kansas in 1968, sculptor Robert Mallary described their collaboration as a process whereby Jeff as a programmer "enabled the computer to plot endless simulations of the kinds of drawings and paintings that Colette was creating by hand in her studio.
"[7] The Bangerts viewed the computer both as tool for research into the nature of the world and as a collaborator in the production of art.
An artist made a drawing by laying down lines on paper, impelled by the mind's insight into visual form.
A plotter made a drawing by laying down lines on paper, impelled by the mind's insight into mathematical form.
In works like Large Landscape: Ochre & Black (1970), Grass Series (1979–1983), Circe's Window (1985) and Katie Series (1986–1987), modular elements such as lines, curves, and shapes were modified by affine transforms and blending algorithms and arranged by chance operations and spatial-ordering algorithms to produce abstract landscapes and naturalistic patterns.
Recursive spatial division returns as a theme in the "mud crack" series Three A, Three B, and Three C of 2004, and the related print On the Ground (2005).
Images such as AC2923 IAM=4 (2008) turn in a new direction, concerned with reduction of composition to basic elements, arrayed vertically.
This compositional simplicity enters a new phase, a return to the horizontal lines of landscapes coupled with a diaphanous veils of color, in the prints from The Plains Series II (2012), the last digital works produced by the Bangerts.
Times art critic John Canaday found the work "appealing" in its "sensitivity," but dismissed the attempt to model the artist's hand drawn line as facile and lacking the essential qualities of Bangert's work in other media.
It also figured in traveling art shows sponsored by professional organizations such as ACM and IEEE, and in scholarly conferences.
[18][19][20] Herbert Franke, a pioneer of computer graphics and digital art in Europe, published a gallery of the Bangerts' work in Angewandte Informatik, a scholarly journal of applied informatics.
[21] Bangert's role as a woman new media artist allied her with other women in field such as Lillian Schwartz, Vera Molnar, and Joan Truckenbrod.
[22][23] She was active in the Women's Caucus for Art in Kansas City, and exhibited work in Womanhouse.
Much of the work in "old media" reveals the same procedural approach as the algorithmic work—and in the Bangerts' telling, only the choice of tools separated them, not their philosophical underpinnings.