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Join us on the evening of March 6th, 5:30-7:30pm for the opening of Artifacts at the Sanctuary Gallery of the Strother Radical School of Attention.
The Sanctuary Gallery at the Strother School of Radical Attention is pleased to announce ARTIFACTS, an exhibition featuring a conversation between the drawings of visual artist Anna Von Mertens, the photographs of art historian Jennifer L. Roberts, and the work of astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (1868–1921). For decades, Leavitt studied glass plate photographs at the Harvard College Observatory, measuring star brightness one mark of emulsion at a time, her work becoming key to mapping the cosmos. Mirroring Leavitt’s precision, Von Mertens meticulously renders the observatory’s glass plates in graphite on paper. Her repeated, intimate gestures measure themselves against the vastness of the sky. Building on this dialogue, art historian Jennifer L. Roberts, using a macro lens, photographs Von Mertens’s drawings, creating a connection of attention between artist, astronomer, and historian. Roberts' photographs generate new worlds, inviting a closer look at Von Mertens’s work, a deeper engagement with Leavitt’s legacy, and a contemplation of our place in the stars.
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Anna Von Mertens, a visual artist and author, received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant for Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (MIT Press, 2024), expanding on her 2018–2019 Harvard Radcliffe Institute exhibition. Her work, exploring material intelligence as a lens on science and history, has been widely exhibited, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smithsonian American Art Museum; and National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design, Oslo. She is a United States Artists Fellow and a former Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, where she studied dark matter. Von Mertens is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon.
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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 is the author of multiple books spanning American and European art from the 1760s to the present, including Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History, Transporting Visions: the Movement of Images in Early America, and Contact: Art and the Pull of Print. Frequently collaborating with artists, she is known for her work on close looking and her advocacy for the value of making as a form of art-historical research. Her current work explores the reciprocity of art and astrophysics, challenging the binary divisions that are assumed to exist between the humanities and the sciences.