Seeing What’s New
CAC Season at a Glance
Sheida Soleimani: What a Revolutionary Must Know
Oct. 18, 2025 – Jan. 25, 2026
Lillian Schwartz: Pictures from a Gallery:
Oct. 18, 2025 – Jan. 25, 2026
MFA Exhibition
Feb. 20 – March 22, 2026
Michael Stillion: And then it was flowers
April 24 – Aug. 20, 2026
Gee Horton: Chapter 4: In Another Lifetime
April 24 – Aug. 30, 2026
Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) announces its 2025–2026 season, featuring powerful exhibitions that offer space for deep investigation into personal, political, and cultural transformation. With a slate of solo shows and group presentations by emerging and established artists alike, this season continues CAC’s mission to be a laboratory for expression—where artists and audiences make meaning together.
“CAC has always been a space to champion new ideas,” said Christina Vassallo, Alice and Harris Weston Executive Director. “We’re proud to open CAC’s 2025-2026 season with the presentation of Sheida Soleimani’s solo exhibition, “What a Revolutionary Must Know,” to run concurrently with Marcus Leslie Singleton’s recent debut of his first U.S. solo museum exhibition, “New Steps.” Through their very different yet equally compelling perspectives, audiences will encounter new ways of navigating the personal and the political.”
Sheida Soleimani: What a Revolutionary Must Know
Oct. 18, 2025 – Jan. 25, 2026; opening reception Oct. 24, 2025
Sheida Soleimani’s solo exhibition brings together her full “Ghostwriter” series—visually arresting photographs, sculpture, and video that piece together the remarkable journey of her parents' escape from Iran’s totalitarian regime. Through constructed sets and surreal visual metaphors, Soleimani reconstructs their fractured history into works of resistance and reckoning. This deeply personal series presents a family’s survival story as a larger meditation on identity, memory, and political trauma. This marks the first time she is showing video work in a museum context.
Soleimani, raised in Cincinnati’s Loveland neighborhood, is an Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist whose multimedia work excavates histories of political violence connecting Iran, the United States, and the broader Middle East. Born to parents who fled Iran as political refugees in the early 1980s, Soleimani transforms source images from mass and digital media into striking photo-based installations, often staged in surreal, symbolic environments. Her practice spans photography, sculpture, collage, and film, offering viewers layered critiques of authoritarianism, exile, and diaspora.
Soleimani’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, and Kadist Paris, among others. Her projects have been widely covered by outlets including The New York Times, Financial Times, Art in America, and Interview Magazine.
Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Soleimani is an associate professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University. She is also the founder and executive director of Congress of the Birds, and the only federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator in the state. For Wave Pool’s 9th “Welcome Edition”, she created a powerful public artwork of 100 cast aluminum tulips—each one honoring a protestor killed in Iran following the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini in Tehran, Iran. The tulips debuted at the 2023 Armory Show and have since raised funds for both CAC and Wave Pool and are available for purchase at CAC’s gift shop.
Lillian Schwartz: Pictures from a Gallery
Oct. 18, 2025 – Jan. 25, 2026
Lillian Schwartz (1927-2024) pays tribute to family, memory, and her Cincinnati roots in the short film “Pictures from a Gallery” (1976). The six-and-a-half-minute film—featuring music by Albert Miller—uses 1970s computer technology to transform black-and-white photographs of Schwartz’s family, their home, and scenes of Cincinnati into a dreamlike sequence.
Born in Cincinnati, Schwartz was a trailblazer in computer-generated art. Her career began with sculpture and evolved into groundbreaking work at Bell Labs, where she collaborated with early digital composers and scientists on films and animations that defined a new visual language. Despite facing sexism and skepticism in both tech and art circles, Schwartz’s pioneering spirit led to international acclaim, with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the ICA London, the São Paulo Biennial, and Cannes Film Festival.
“Pictures from a Gallery” offers a rare glimpse into the artist’s deeply personal relationship with Cincinnati, and reinforces themes of memory, place, and familial connection.
Lillian Schwartz, born Lillian Feldman, grew up as the twelfth of thirteen children in Cincinnati’s Clifton neighborhood. Overcoming early hardship, she began working at age 13 and joined the U.S. Cadet Nurse Program at 16. After relocating to New Jersey, she gained national recognition for her work at Bell Labs and later became the first artist to win an Emmy for a computer-generated PSA. Her work continues to inspire generations of artists at the intersection of art and technology.
MFA Exhibition (Miami University & University of Cincinnati)
Feb. 20 – March 22, 2026
The annual MFA exhibition returns, showcasing the innovative work of graduate students from Miami University and the University of Cincinnati. The show offers a platform for artists at the start of their careers to present research-driven, experimental practices in a professional museum setting. The exhibition will be accompanied by artist talks, providing an opportunity for public engagement with the next generation of contemporary creators.
Michael Stillion: “And then it was flowers”
April 24 – Aug. 20, 2026
Michael Stillion’s work explores portraiture, symbolism, and the human condition through emotionally charged, visually layered compositions. In “And then it was flowers” Stillion presents recent paintings depicting stone and ceramic vessels with human features, paired with exaggerated poppy flowers, serving as metaphors for fragility and impermanence. Working in painting, collage, and mixed media, Stillion blends personal iconography with surreal imagery, often drawing from childhood cartoons, classical art techniques, and rural Ohio landscapes.
Based in Cincinnati, Stillion holds an MFA from Indiana University and a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design. He is a visiting assistant professor at Miami University and a recipient of multiple Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in both public and private collections.
Gee Horton: “Chapter 4: In Another Lifetime”
April 24 – Aug. 30, 2026
Gee Horton’s hyperrealist portraits center Black identity, vulnerability, and belonging. Known for drawing attention to underrepresented histories and communities, Horton uses meticulous graphite and charcoal renderings to create intimate, reflective portraits. Based in Cincinnati, Horton’s multidisciplinary practice maps the emotional terrain of Black life—where memory, masculinity, and inherited grief converge.
For “Chapter 4: In Another Lifetime”, Horton premieres a new body of work, marking a new direction in his practice. In this chapter, Horton employs symbolic imagery and dream logic to examine intergenerational trauma, cultural legacy, and the aesthetics of emotional inheritance.
Horton stepped away from a corporate career in 2020 to pursue his art full time. His “Chapter 1: Coming of Age” series debuted at the Alice F. & Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati in 2021; his exhibition “Chapter 2: A Subtle Farewell to the Inner Child” was presented as part of the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial; and, “Chapter 3: Be Home Before the Streetlights,” was presented at the Kentucky Museum of Contemporary Art in late 2024. His work has appeared on HBO’s Insecure and Amazon’s Harlem, and he received an Emmy Award for his portrait and storytelling of abolitionist Peter H. Clark, created during his residency at The Mercantile Library of Cincinnati.
Horton is the founder of Gee Horton Studio Gallery, a hybrid space for storytelling, creative production, and fine art printing. His work is included in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, The Mercantile Library, and numerous private collections.
“The exhibitions in CAC’s 2025–2026 season are powerful reminders of how artists reflect our world—its beauty, its complexities, and everything in between,” said Theresa Bembnister, CAC curator. “Experiencing these works in a shared space offers an opportunity to reconnect, to reflect, and to reclaim a sense of community and humanity. Through distinct approaches, Soleimani, Schwartz, Stillion, and Horton each explore themes of legacy, history, and identity in ways that feel both deeply personal and profoundly timely.”