Erica Blumenfeld’s art is formed by ink on paper—but it’s rooted in century-old artifacts and inspired by unsung astronomy pioneers
shows me is an expanse of deep blue, a rich color that speaks of romance and night. It’s stippled with gold marks, some as lines, some as arrows, some as dots. Her art is formed by ink on paper—but it’s rooted in century-old artifacts, inspired by unsung astronomy pioneers, and animated by a quest to understand light.
They left marks of many kinds: on some of the plates, only a few arrows or characters; on others, notes from conversations between women across decades, each striving to better understand the universe. Henrietta Swan Leavitt, 1868-1921 , and Annie Jump Cannon, 1863-1941Digitization preserves the astronomical data on the Harvard College Observatory glass plates. But preserving their cultural significance and honoring the women who deciphered them is a separate effort.
By the time Blumenfeld heard about this process in 2019, more than 400,000 plates had been scanned. “When I learned that they were actually wiping the plates clean of the marks, I was deeply saddened,” she tells me. She set out to preserve the beauty and meaning of the marks, if only on a handful of plates. In honor of the women whose work inspired her own, Blumenfeld calls her art “Tracing Luminaries.
Starting in the late 1990s, Blumenfeld began building novel lensless cameras uniquely geared to collecting celestial light, from the faint to the squintingly bright. As she made art from the beams of lunar phases, sun cycles, and solstices, Blumenfeld launched what would become continuing engagements with scientific researchers and data.
Without access to the physical plates, Blumenfeld resorted to working virtually. She spent weeks looking through thousands of plate photographs in the DASCH digital-image portal. Eventually, she chose images of six plates: observations made from 1892 through 1923, including views of both the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, the Taurus and Pegasus constellations, and Jupiter with its eighth moon.
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