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.
Visual artist and author Anna Von Mertens is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Public Understanding of Science and Technology book grant in support of Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, published by the MIT Press in 2024. The book is an expansion of Von Mertens’s 2018-2019 exhibition at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, which traveled to the University Galleries of Illinois State University and Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in 2023. She received 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 labor-intensive artworks use material intelligence as a lens to see science and history and have been widely exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Berkeley Art Museum; RISD Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery; Aspen Art Museum; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, and National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design in Oslo, Norway. The artist 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 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.
