A 100,000-square-foot museum in a Kansas college town of 55,000 people is about to host one of the most significant generative art exhibitions assembled to date.

The Museum of Art + Light in Manhattan, Kansas will open EMULATION: Selections from the Art Blocks 500 on March 4, 2026, bringing together 10 internationally recognized artists who write code as their primary creative medium. The show marks Art Blocks’ completion of its 500th flagship project in late 2025, closing what the Ethereum-based platform calls “a foundational era in on-chain generative art.”

The museum opened on November 8, 2024, with an inaugural exhibition called Code & Canvas: Defining Digital Art in the Age of Blockchain, featuring Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon and generative artist Tyler Hobbs. EMULATION goes considerably wider, drawing from five years of projects across Art Blocks’ Curated, Playground, Factory, Presents, Collaborations, and Explorations categories.

The roster spans a wide range of approaches to code-based art. Kelly Milligan, Carolina Melis, Harvey Rayner, Grant Oesterling, Anthony Hiley-Mann (MountVitruvius), Sterling Crispin, Licia He, Iskra Velitchkova, Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez, and Loie Hollowell work across algorithmic drawing, interactive systems, textile translation, machine intelligence, and conceptual abstraction, according to the museum’s press release. Each piece is generated by the artist’s algorithm at the moment of execution, meaning no two outputs are alike.

“This exhibition highlights artists who are using code not as a novelty, but as a deeply intentional medium,” Erin Dragotto, the museum’s executive director, said in the press release. “One capable of carrying history, emotion, and experimentation forward in meaningful ways.”

Code. Chance. Creativity.

EMULATION: Selections from the @artblocks_io 500 exhibition opens March 4 at the Museum of Art + Light. Where art works reflect a dialogue between past and present, material and virtual, intention and chance.

Featuring 10 amazing artists:… pic.twitter.com/6hz7NkDKmw
— Museum of Art + Light (@museumartlight) February 17, 2026

The exhibition will spotlight Carolina Melis’s Kubikino series, with select works from the 2023 Art Blocks release rotating on screen. A giclée print, Randomness (2025), will complement the digital presentation. The Kubikino series uses a visual vocabulary derived from the circle on a modular grid, exploring identity, pattern recognition, and collective form, according to the press release.

Calderon, also known as Snowfro, framed the 500th project as the end of a chapter rather than a waypoint. “Generative art has always been about systems, constraints, and creative intent,” he said in the press release. “Reaching the 500th project was a meaningful milestone for the platform, and EMULATION captures the diversity and depth of practices that artists have developed within those constraints.” Art Blocks has signaled that what follows is preservation and new experiments rather than more additions to the flagship collection.

Several of the 10 artists have established followings beyond the generative art community. Loie Hollowell, a New York-based painter represented by Pace Gallery, released her first generative project, Contractions, through Art Blocks in October 2022. The series of 280 works translated her sculptural paintings into unique digital outputs, according to Art Blocks’ project description. Iskra Velitchkova appeared in Art Blocks’ Tokens of Presence exhibition in Marfa in November 2024, showing alongside artists including Michael Kozlowski and Zach Lieberman.

The exhibition will also anchor the museum’s main gala on May 2, where it will share the evening with the opening of Picasso: Art in Motion, an immersive exhibition, according to the press release. The pairing puts generative code art on the same bill as a 20th century master, a juxtaposition that would have been difficult to imagine at most institutions a few years ago. The museum, conceived by founders Tracey and Robert DeBruyn, houses a 21,500-square-foot immersive exhibition space that has hosted a Renoir projection installation since opening.

EMULATION: Selections from the Art Blocks 500 is on view March 4 through August 16, 2026, at the Museum of Art + Light, 316 Pierre Street, Manhattan, Kansas.

Editor’s note: This article was written by a Now Media staff member in collaboration with Claude’s Opus 4.6.