In Glitched Reality, students from Niagara University and Niagara Falls High School engage with a bold question:

What happens when human creativity meets machine intelligence in the act of artmaking?

Using AI tools as digital paint brushes, students reinterpreted artworks from the Castellani Art Museum’s permanent collection—reimagining historic portraits, landscapes, and folk art through a contemporary lens. Their work reflects personal stories, cultural identity, environmental urgency, and speculative futures.

Across the exhibition, many final images visually echo the source material. While some may view this as a limitation of AI—or of the creative process itself—we invite you to look deeper. These students weren’t trying to copy. They were exploring how AI can amplify human thought, rather than override it. For many, the process became a back-and-forth: a collaborative, sometimes frustrating, often surprising journey that brought their vision into sharper focus.

Take Nevaeh Frazier’s piece Where Memories Live, which reinterprets Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach through an attic scene glowing with nostalgic memory boxes. Inspired by the storytelling tradition of Ringgold’s quilts, Nevaeh used AI to visualize what memory feels like—a dreamy blend of joy, family, and time passed.

Or Katie Minicucci’s They Know Not What They Do, which combines the drama of 19th-century Niagara Falls photography with a critique of modern power, pollution, and political indifference. Through dozens of iterative prompts, Katie pushed the AI to manifest a dystopian vision that reflects her research, emotions, and musical influences—ultimately creating a bold, symbolic visual that the AI alone could never have generated.

In Isabella Lemke’s Nature Awakening, AI became a way to visually connect personal identity to community values. Drawing from Erwin Printup Jr.’s LXV, Isabella used Stable Diffusion and NightCafe to create a serene tribute to the Haudenosaunee relationship with nature. Her repeated prompt revisions show a determined effort to get the flag, the birds, and the mood just right—not for aesthetics alone, but to honor her heritage.

We recognize the skepticism that often surrounds AI-generated art. It’s a fair and necessary concern—especially in cultural spaces that value artistic authorship and intentionality. But what if this isn’t the end of artistic authenticity, but an evolution of it?

As OpenAI’s Sam Altman puts it, AI represents a “democratization of content creation.” It doesn’t erase the artist—it expands the toolkit. These student works are not mere outputs. They are decisions. They are research. They are stories. They are distinctly human.

This exhibition does not claim to have all the answers. But it does ask:

If the tools are evolving, how will our creativity evolve with them?

In a world of accelerating automation, Glitched Reality reminds us that human imagination remains the most essential generator of all.

Student Artists: Edward Beckles Jr., Emily Brock, Abigail Dishaw, Nevaeh Frazier, Matthew Insinna, Qutaiba Kaleem, Isabella Lemke, Sydney Lomasney, Katie Minicucci, and Alex Robertson