Talk about a kid in a candy shop. When Vero Beach Museum of Art curator Jay Williams was asked to select works for a new exhibition from the NASA art collection, he found it hard to make up his mind.
And the curatorial staff at the Kennedy Space Center “didn’t say no to anything,” he marvels.
“They gave us everything we asked for.”
“We” refers to the museum’s chief preparator, Matthew Mangold, who accompanied Williams to Cape Canaveral. That trip took place about two years ago, when “Out of this World: The Art and Artists of NASA” was just a twinkle in the curator’s eye. Williams says that Mangold, who has an art history degree as well as a talent for packing and installing art, was a boon companion in the initial selection process.
The two spent eight hours poring over the 300 to 400 pieces in storage at the Space Center. The entire collection, the lion’s share of which is at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., comprises 3,000 artworks.
“We wanted to cover NASA’s history, as well as various styles of art NASA had commissioned, ranging from very contemporary and almost abstract work, to work that is documentary and realist in style,” says Williams. Seventy-one artworks made the final cut for the show.
And don’t expect a room of renderings of obscure rocket parts. Sure, the air and space buffs among us have plenty to swoon over: the meticulously detailed paintings of experimental rocket planes soaring above the clouds by Stan Stokes, Ren Wicks and Michael Machat; another Stan Stokes of a fiery Apollo mission blast-off; Wilson Hurley’s conceptual views of space probes approaching Saturn and Mars.
Even the most hopelessly left-brained among us will appreciate the painterly skill and you-are-there drama displayed in every one of those technical masterpieces.
Art lovers of all stripes will be amused by the William Wegman 2001 photograph “Chip and Batty Explore Space” that greets visitors just outside the entrance to the Holmes Gallery. Some patrons will remember that Wegman’s large-scale photos were featured in the same gallery five years ago.
Celebrated for using his pet Weimaraners as actors in his artistic musings on the human comedy, Wegman’s NASA-themed offering shows a space-suited Chip floating away from a space station where Batty, Chip’s real-life mother, gazes forlornly after him.
Other contemporary works on exhibit include Annie Leibovitz’s solemn 1999 photo of Colonel Eileen Collins wearing a vivid orange pressure suit. There is Robert Rauschenberg’s six-and-a-half-foot-tall lithograph “Hotshot” from 1982, Andy Warhol’s “Moonwalk (Pink)” from 1987, and Elizabeth McGrath’s “Moon Mission” from 2008.
The last is a humorous take on astronaut Alan Shephard’s Feb. 6, 1971, stunt of driving a golf ball on the moon. McGrath’s mixed-media construction bears the legends “Lords of the Lunar Links” and “Ham and Enos Jr.” in carnival-type script above and below a window that reveals a two-headed, google-eyed bipedal creature. Depicted standing on the moon’s cratered surface (in a plaid golf sweater, no less), the little alien is posed at the top of a backswing in anticipation of its own moon shot.
Works by artists that were names back in the day occupy a corner of the gallery devoted to NASA in the 1960s. A cubism-inspired watercolor of a rocket on its launch pad is the subject of Lamar Dodd’s “Saturn Structure” (1969). Below that is an impressionistic watercolor of the same subject by Peter Hurd, “Pre-launch Activity” (1973). Known for his murals and paintings of the American West, Hurd also happened to be Andrew Wyeth’s brother-in-law.
Wyeth himself begged off doing a commission for NASA in favor of his son, Jamie Wyeth, whose 1965 watercolor “Waiting” depicts a lull in the Gemini program’s launch schedule. A lonely palm tree dead center in that composition is flanked left and right by two distant launch towers.
The tour de force of the section, however, is the acrylic on board painting by John Pike, popularly remembered for his painting school, how-to books and line of eponymous art supplies. His “Moon Jewel” (1969) shows the nighttime launch preparations of the manned Apollo 10 spacecraft. In the embrace of a spot-lit launch tower, a gleaming rocket is readied for takeoff. Behind it looms the moon, looking for all the world like a gigantic meteor about to crash into earth. Not that much farther out, Mars glows enticingly.
The other painting in the exhibition that approaches “Moon Jewel” for spectacle is an operatic composition painted by Hungarian-born Attila Hejja. “The Cape Winds” (1983) depicts a vast landscape in which a colossal crawler-transporter bears a space shuttle and its rockets to the launch site. The sky that dominates the scene is filled with storm clouds that theatrically part just above the launch tower, flooding the shuttle’s slow path with light.
Martin Hoffman, a Florida native who resided in Vero during the last dozen years of his life (and is the subject of a 32963 obituary by this writer following his death here in 2013), is represented by two paintings in “Out of this World.” An artist of both regional and national note, Hoffman simultaneously juggled two artistic careers. As an illustrator, he created art for movie posters, record albums and print advertisements; as a fine artist, he exhibited contemporary realist paintings at O.K. Harris Gallery in New York City.
Hoffman’s paintings in the current exhibition are sly takes on the reportage of the Space Program. “Sunrise Suit-Up,” made in 1981, is a view from the site reserved for the media during launches. It presents a drab landscape whose foreground is taken up by audio equipment, a cold cup of coffee and TV monitors that transmit identical images of an astronaut being strapped into his suit by a pair of disembodied arms.
His “Launch Window” painted the same year is compositionally divided into three parts. From left to right they show a temporary TV studio where two news anchors face a camera; the blank expanse of stretched canvas that forms one side of the studio, and the lift-off itself, isolated in a compartment of blue sky. While Hoffman’s ostensible subject is the prosaic side of news gathering, he offers us the pure delight of his picture-painting prowess, including masterful drawing and sensual, often dimensional, paint handling.
Like a proud parent, Jay Williams is reluctant to reveal his favorite artwork in the group.
“All of the artworks are of equal quality, they’re very, very good,” he says.
“If I had a gallery twice this size, I would show more.”
The space art exhibition runs through Sept. 25.
