Dream Dance: The Art of Ed Emshwiller

Lightbox Film Center presents Dream Dance: The Art of Ed Emshwiller, the first major monographic exhibition of the artist’s groundbreaking work. Emshwiller’s career spanned abstract expressionist painting, commercial illustration, film, video and computer art, and collaborations with dancers, choreographers, and composers. The project includes the preservation of two of Emshwiller’s earliest films, Chromatic (1959) and Lifelines (1960), which will be screened at Lightbox along with 19 of his other films—some of which have never been publicly presented in Philadelphia—as well as notable films by other filmmakers for which he served as cinematographer.

A concurrent exhibition at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery highlights Emshwiller’s visual and fine art background, including video works, early paintings, notes, sketches, ephemera, and many early science fiction book cover paintings.