50 Years of NASA/ART
NASA’s yearlong celebration of 50th anniversary of space exploration has culminated into a unique space art exhibit. From McCall, Warhol to Wegman, NASA/ART – 50 Years of Exploration, is a diverse collection of various artistic expressions of space exploration.
“As the space agency turns 50 this fall, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) will launch a national tour of NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration, featuring 73 works from those artists. NASA | ART opens at the Art League of Bonita Springs in Bonita Springs, Fla., Oct. 25. It will be on view there through Jan. 17, 2009, and then travel to 10 museums through 2011. The exhibition is organized by SITES and NASA in cooperation with the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. It features nearly five decades of creations by artists as diverse as Annie Leibovitz, Nam June Paik, Norman Rockwell, Doug and Mike Starn, Andy Warhol and William Wegman…These works—ranging from the illustrative to the abstract—offer unparalleled insight into the private and personal moments, triumphant victories and tragic accidents that form the storied history of NASA.”
A companion book with the same title as the exhibit will be on sale at the traveling exhibit.
Moon’s Mini Modern Art Museum
Guerrilla style, artist Forrest “Frosty” Myers stowed modern art on a lunar lander to the moon, in 1969. S contemporary artists in the Apollo days—Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest “Frosty” Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain—contributed a drawing each which were “miniaturized and baked onto an iridium-plated ceramic wafer measuring just 3/4″ x 1/2″ x 1/40″, with the assistance of engineers at Bell Labs.” Naturally NASA would reject a cool idea like that, which led Myers to secretly collaborate with an anonymous Northrop Grumman engineer who secretly installed the “museum” on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module. Some say that Warhol’s drawing was a squiggle of his initials but others say it’s his penis. Art is objective.
Astronaut/artist also left behind several rolls of undeveloped film on the lunar surface. Who knows what radiation has done to the film, but it would be great to get them processed and see what Bean documented. Humans like to mark their territory, and artists do it with their work.
Space Sounds
Greg Niemeyer is an open source advocate and he also composes space sounds amongst other things via programming.
