Lillian Schwartz was a groundbreaking digital artist whose computer-assisted work in the 1960s and ‘70s pre-dated personal home computers and mainstream digital art by many years.
- Died: October 12, 2024 (Who else died on October 12?)
- Details of death: Died in New York City at the age of 97.
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Lillian Schwartz’s legacy
Schwartz began making art as a child in Cincinnati, Ohio, using anything she could get her hands on. Her attraction to unusual media for art continued into adulthood, fully blossoming in the 1960s, when she began to use mechanical equipment, lightboxes, and eventually cutting-edge computer equipment to create her work.
A 1968 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art changed the trajectory of Schwartz’s career. Called “Proxima Centauri,” her mechanically-activated sculpture on display caught the attention of the fine art world for its blending of machinery and artistry. Following the exhibition, researcher Leon D. Harmon asked Schwartz to visit Bell Labs in New Jersey, for a time one of the most innovative places on the planet. Schwartz was instantly taken by the potential of digital technology in art. For over the next three decades, from 1969 to 2002, she would craft her work there.
Schwartz blended together pixilated images and moving, shifting designs, played with evolving color schemes, and often married them with electronic soundscapes to create short art films. Long before CGI became commonplace in movies, and computers were in practically every household, she was pushing at the edges of what these devices could manifest.
Her work has been featured at the Venice and Cannes film festivals and has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Grand Palais Museum in Paris, and many other museums and galleries. A short Museum of Modern Art public service announcement she created for television earned Schwartz an Emmy Award in 1984, and she won the Winsor McCay Award in 2021. Her 1992 book, “The Computer Artist’s Handbook,” written with Laurens R. Schwartz, chronicles her work up to that time.
Tributes to Lillian Schwartz
Full obituary: The New York Times
