Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 4: Digital Era (1960s)

1968

Lillian Schwartz Begins Her Computer Art Career

Exhibition · North America · Women Artists

Left: Lillian Schwartz looking through one of her cast acrylic panels, 1968. Right: her Illuminated Light Box, 1966 - a two-picture plate from The Henry Ford's Schwartz archive.
Left: Lillian Schwartz looking through one of her cast acrylic panels, 1968. Right: her Illuminated Light Box, 1966 - a two-picture plate from The Henry Ford's Schwartz archive. The Henry Ford, Lillian F. Schwartz Collection (THF706047 and THF188459).

According to the biography on her website, “Schwartz began her computer art career as an offshoot of her merger of art and technology, which culminated in the selection of her kinetic sculpture, Proxima Centauri, by The Museum of Modern Art for its epoch-making 1968 Machine Exhibition.” She would soon after become an artist in residence at Bell Labs, working with Leon Harmon and Kenneth Knowlton.

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.

Sources

People

Ken Knowlton, Leon Harmon, Lillian Schwartz

Movements

computer animation, computer art

Filed under

Ideas
collaboration, Technology and Art
Technologies
computer animation, computer art, kinetic sculpture
People
Ken Knowlton, Leon Harmon, Lillian Schwartz
Works
Art and Technology, Proxima Centauri
Exhibitions
The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age
Organisations
Bell Labs, MoMA

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