In 2025, many of us will take more pictures in a week than families took in a lifetime a century ago. We also relate to photographs differently. These days, a photo exists in the cloud rather than framed and hung above the hearth. While we capture many more moments, most will never be printed and many may never even be revisited. We relate to photographs through scrolling, posting, filtering and liking. A century ago, families gathered around their photo albums, delicately turning the pages to revisit the faces and places they once were. Lillian Schwartz: Pictures from a Gallery reminds us that the way we interact with photos shapes how we remember the people and worlds that formed us.
Born in Cincinnati in 1927, Schwartz came of age long before the selfie era. She was the twelfth of thirteen children, raised in a family whose memories were captured in black and white photos and stored in albums with dates penciled in. She began her studies in traditional Chinese brushwork and painting but soon ventured out from these mediums. Her 1968 sculpture “Proxima Centauri” was an interactive, kinetic sculpture alive with movement and light projections. The work was then exhibited in MoMA’s The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age and the Brooklyn Museum’s Some More Beginnings, leading to her invitation to the famously innovative R&D company Bell Laboratories in New Jersey through engineer-artist Leon Harmon. By the end of the decade, Schwartz was working at Bell Labs, where she stood at the forefront of merging art and computers, a developing technology still only available to well-heeled researchers. Surrounded by engineers and scientists, Schwartz learned to treat machines as a creative vessel.
When you walk into Lillian Schwartz: Pictures from a Gallery, open through Jan. 25 at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), the world seems to slow down. An air of nostalgia hangs over the exhibition. Curated by the CAC’s Theresa Bembnister, the show centers on Schwartz’s family but leads viewers to think of their own kith and kin.
In the center of the gallery sits a bench beneath a dome-shaped speaker, where visitors sit and watch Pictures from a Gallery (1976), Schwartz’s 6’33” video installation and the centerpiece of the exhibition. Music composed by Albert Miller accompanies the video — a surprisingly poppy, contemporary dance rhythm that contrasts with the experimental, vintage photos on display. Step back, and the music slowly drones on, taking on a more haunting, distant quality, like the memories of times passed by.
Pictures from a Gallery projects old photos of parents, siblings, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in a pulsing, pixelating phantasmagoria. While we are accustomed to viewing such photographs in sepia tone, here the palette is composed of greens, yellows, oranges and reds. Each image morphs into the next, the faces slowly vanishing into shifting digital hazes, phasing together through inherited traits and family resemblance. It’s like flipping through a stack of live photos too quickly to appreciate any single one before it fades.
Theresa Bembnister told CityBeat that the biggest challenge in presenting Pictures from a Gallery was determining how to best give “viewers the opportunity to learn about the life of this groundbreaking artist who grew up in Cincinnati.” A small resource area, organized by CAC’s Interpretation Specialist Riley Haag and Director of Education Elizabeth Hardin-Klink, presents books and archival material related to Schwartz’s career. But it’s tucked off to the side of the gallery, briefly out of view. To reach it, you must step away from the projected flow of memories.
Off to the side of the gallery, an illuminated white desk invites visitors to sit, pick up a pencil and write their own reflections on how they preserve their family memories, pinning their response cards to the wall like shards of a shared mind. Bembnister noted that when the exhibition opened on Oct. 18, she was surprised by some of the response cards. “People wrote about taking snapshots with disposable cameras and finding photo albums and memory boxes from older relatives.” It’s telling that Schwartz’s digital art evokes such analog recollections and leads viewers to appreciate the way that other senses — familiar scents and sounds, for instance — can elicit a rush of memory.
This invitation to participate turns Pictures from a Gallery into a kind of point-and-shoot camera aimed right back at us, leading viewers to reflect on how we document our lives. But it isn’t a judgmental idealization of the past. As a pioneer of computer art, Schwartz celebrates the digital age. The juxtaposition between old and new offers an occasion to reflect. Perhaps we don’t need to archive every passing second; we only need to notice the moments that stay with us, even as they shift and reshape each time we recall them. Maybe we can also let up on that modern impulse to record everything.
The installation reminds us that every act of remembering is also an act of forgetting. Each time we revisit a memory, we rewrite it slightly, and in doing so, keep it alive. Schwartz’s work embodies that process. Through every transubstantiating image, she shows that memories are fluid, ever-changing stories.
“I hope people see that memories of family life in Cincinnati were inspiring to a groundbreaking, internationally celebrated artist,” Bembnister says. Schwartz may have worked with computers and algorithms, but her true material was human tenderness: the small, ordinary gestures that endure long after the technology fades.
Lillian Schwartz: Pictures From A Gallery runs through Jan. 25, 2026, at the Contemporary Arts Center. So come in, sit down, and think of your own family, your own city and your own mental archive. As the projection ends, fading into hues of red, blue and green, you might wonder, as Schwartz surely did: what image will remain, and how will you remember it?
For more information about the exhibit, visit contemporaryartscenter.org.
