|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In the summer of 2024, the Art Museum received an extraordinarily stunning gift from Jonathan and Elizabeth Howland, ardent and long-standing supporters of the New Bedford institution.
The donation was a sextet of large photographs (on metal plates) of deep space, captured by NASA’s Webb and Hubble telescopes, and selected with the knowing eye of curator Mark Munkacsy, president of the Astronomical Society of Southern New England. The six fantastic images reveal the profound beauty of the universe.
They are a visual documentation that serves as a nexus between art and science, all the while revealing the reverberations of the Big Bang, the boundlessness of the cosmos, the formation and destruction of stars, and humanity’s endless curiosity, from off-planet exploration to the search for extraterrestrial life.
In collaboration with the University of Massachusett Dartmouth, the Art Museum is working on a plan to bring the photographs to students in the New Bedford Public School system, ranging from neighborhood elementary schools to the high school. The services of a “science expert” will be engaged to further enhance the educational opportunities.
The six NASA photographs are currently on display in the People’s Gallery at the Art Museum, along with work by a half-dozen artists either directly inspired by the images or otherwise creating work that embraces the wonders of the night sky.
“Veil Nebula” is a mosaic of six Hubble Space Telescope photographs covering a “small” area approximately two light-years across. The Veil Nebula is a debris field of supernova remnants, deriving its name from its seemingly delicate filamentary structure.
Wisps of gas are all that remain of a star once 20 times larger than our sun. It glows with veins of vivid purple and yellow, along with streaks of white, red and orange before an eternal blackness, dotted by distant stars.
“Cassiopeia” is a new mid-infrared photograph from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope showing the supernova remnant of the same name, which was created by a stellar explosion 340 years ago, from the perspective of the Earth. It appears as a fiery ring.
In Greek mythology, Cassiopeia was the Queen of Ethiopia and the mother of Andromeda. She bragged that she and/or her daughter was more beautiful than the Nereids, Poseidon’s sea nymphs, which so enraged the God of the Sea that he punished her by placing her among the stars. The NASA image shows that Cassiopeia’s exquisiteness remains unfaded.
“Pillars of Creation,” a new photograph from the Webb Telescope that was first captured by Hubble in 1995, reveals greater details. The three-dimensional pillars look like rock formations but exist in a far more permeable state. The columns are formed of cool interstellar gas and dust that, at times, appear semi-transparent in near-infrared light.
There are fiery amorphous anomalies that exist within “Pillars of Creation” that evoke creatures of myth as well: dragons, hellhounds, giant birds of prey, and worms worthy of “Dune.” It’s not a huge leap from night sky gazing to wondering what is out there.
“Cassini’s Pale Blue Dot” was taken with a wide-angle lens camera on the International Cassini spacecraft. It is an image of the planet Saturn, easily identifiable by its famous rings, and other heavenly bodies.
The utilization of red, green and blue filters allowed for a natural color view. The images were obtained on July 19, 2024, at a distance of 1.212 million kilometers from Saturn and 1445.858 kilometers from Earth.
Alongside the great sphere that is the ringed planet, there is a minuscule pale blue dot on an unending expanse of black and purple. That blue dot is the Earth. It is a humbling realization.
Beyond the last two deep space photographs, “Deep Field” taken from the Webb Telescope, and “Andromeda Galaxy,” shot by earthbound amateur astronomer Robert Gendler, there are works on display by the team of Harvey Goldman and Jing Wang, as well as Taylor Hickey, Rachel Ostrow, Rosanne Somerson and David Poyant.
Goldman is a renowned ceramicist, experimental filmmaker, musician and multidisciplinary artist who founded the Digital Media Program at UMD. Jing Wang is a professor of music at the same institution, who specializes in electroacoustic music, composition and music theory.
The two friends and colleagues worked in tandem to produce “Space,” a short experimental film on continual loop in the gallery. Goldman’s fanciful imagery of planets and stars are so perfectly in sync with Wang’s soothing and thoughtful composition, that it achieves a pleasant kind of synthetic synesthesia, in which one can imagine seeing the music and hearing the visual movement.
Hickey, a local printmaker, sculptor and paper artist, who graduated with an MFA from UMD in 2021, is represented by her crisp linocuts. “Tessellation l” is done in her signature crisp black-and-white and is a welcome momentary reprieve from the barrage of brilliantly hued work of her co-exhibitors in the People’s Gallery. Her “Luna” is on display behind the desk in the front lobby.
Ostrow, a Brooklyn-based painter, printmaker and designer, exhibits a series of terrific paintings featuring spheres that hover somewhere between geometric abstractions and comic book planets. They were created by dragging screen printing squeegees over ink and/or paint over panels that spun on a makeshift turntable.
Somerson, a former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, displays a series of photographs of the aurora borealis, a bit quieter and closer-to-home complement to the boisterous NASA images.
David Poyant, a retired cobbler and self-taught “thread painter” who will be featured in “Threading Stories,” a one-person exhibition at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River starting on Feb. 14, displays an embroidered canvas that is his own unique take on one of the NASA photographs. It is almost as brilliant.
“Nebulae / The Universe Unveiled” is at the Art Museum, 608 Pleasant St., New Bedford, through March 9.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
