About We Are Stardust: A Conversation with Anna Von Mertens and Jennifer Roberts
Join artist Anna Von Mertens and art historian Jennifer Roberts as the two explore the extraordinary in the ordinary. Their conversation will paint a portrait of the trailblazing astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (1868 – 1921) and include the book project published this September by the MIT Press, which emerged from their shared interest in Leavitt’s remarkable story. Anna Von Mertens will review the methodologies behind Leavitt’s work and the significance of her foundational discovery that enabled the measurement of largescale astronomical distance for the first time, launching modern cosmology. Von Mertens and Roberts will discuss the artworks they made in response to Leavitt’s legacy, including photographs by Roberts using a macro lens to bring forward the material richness of the astronomical glass plate photographs Leavitt studied, and drawings of starlight captured in emulsion by Von Mertens based on some of those glass plates.
Learn from Von Mertens and Roberts as the two reveal their collaborative process, the power of attention in observation, artistic creation, and the making of meaning.
About the Speakers:
Anna Von Mertens’s forthcoming book Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (Fall 2024 MIT Press) received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Public Understanding of Science and Technology book grant. Her 2018–2019 exhibition Measure, presented at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, traveled to the University Galleries of Illinois State University and Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in 2023. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studied dark matter as a structuring force in our universe, and a United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College; Berkeley Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; RISD Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery; and Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Von Mertens is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon.
Jennifer L. Roberts is an art historian whose scholarship focuses on the interface between the arts and the natural sciences, the history and theory of craft and materiality, and the history of print. After receiving her A.B. in English and Art History from Stanford (1992) and her Ph.D. in History of Art from Yale (2000), she joined the Harvard faculty in 2002. She held the Slade Professorship in Fine Arts at Cambridge University in 2019 and delivered the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in 2021.
In her scholarship and curating, Roberts has consistently emphasized the material intelligence of art and its makers and the challenge of storing and transmitting meaning through space and time. Her first book, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (2004), examines everything from crystallography to eschatology to show how Smithson built material models of time to confront the erasures of traditional history. Her book Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (2014), forges a material history of visual communication by tracing the literal transportation of pictures through the swamps, forests, oceans, and cities of the Anglo-American landscape between 1760 and 1860. In 2012 she curated the exhibition Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print for the Harvard Art Museums. That project sparked her interest in the generative power of the physical operations of printing – reversal, pressure, transfer, incision, etc. – and led to her forthcoming book with Princeton University Press, based on her Mellon Lectures, titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print.
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