AARON – Harold Cohen exhibitions at major museums around the world, including Britain’s Tate Gallery in 1983

As mentioned as a key “under the radar” event in generative art history by Casey Reas in an interview with Le Random, the exhibition of Harold Cohen’s AARON at major institutions around the world was sadly an outlier in terms of computer-generated art’s institutional acceptance.

Reas continues: “We always talk about the fact that institutions have never supported generative art. And I think that they haven’t at all, in a really awful way, but there are exceptions. Harold Cohen had AARON making drawings at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Tate Gallery in London. Those are really big events that we should promote more. Harold was an extraordinary pioneer in the field.”

Cohen’s SFMOMA show was in 1979, and 1983 is when AARON appeared at Britain’s Tate Gallery, a critical moment of exposure to the legacy art world that was all too rare in computer-generated art’s history.