Tracking the eclipse
Thousands — millions? — of eyes will gaze toward the heavens Monday for the first total solar eclipse to cross the United States in nearly 100 years. It will sweep on a “path of totality” from Oregon through South Carolina. Before and after, the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena is celebrating with the exhibition “Eclipse.”
“I wanted to reference the symbolism we’ve attached to solar eclipses and the profound emotion and transcendent experiences people have,” gallery director and exhibition co-curator Stephen Nowlin said. “I wanted to keep the show in the context of real science, not new ageism or pseudoscience.”
On display are interpretive visual artworks, artifacts, documents and projections, including a montage of images from eclipse expeditions carried out by the Lick Observatory near San Jose in the late 19th and early 20th century. “Back then there was no spacecraft to examine the sun,” Nowlin said. “The only way astronomers could get a good look at the corona of the sun was to travel on arduous expeditions into remote areas of the world.”
New York artist Rosemarie Fiore created her multicolored eclipse series with exposed pigments from colored firework smoke. “Black Sun With Falling Corona,” one of photographer Jacqueline Woods “Black Sun” pictures, evokes a mystical, apocalyptic reversed sun with a burning light encircling it against deep space.
The 19th century landscape painter Howard Russell Butler was one of the earliest artists to depict the occurrences. Trained in physics, he attended multiple eclipses, his first in 1918 with a U.S. Naval Observatory team. His paintings that were so scientifically accurate that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used them for research.
The exhibition runs through Sept. 10.