The Royal Astronomical Society is pleased to announce that our Public Talks for the 2024-25 season will take place at Burlington House at 1pm and 6pm. Please check the schedule as some talks may be online-only due to speaker availability.
This talk is a hybrid event and is free and open to the public and will take place at Burlington House and online at 1pm and 6pm.
To register for the 1pm hybrid talk.
To register for the 6pm hybrid talk.
Our Observable World: The Resonance of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt’s Life and Work
Visual artist and author Anna Von Mertens offers a layered portrait of astronomer Henrietta Leavitt who worked at the Harvard College Observatory at the turn of the 20th century and whose discovery is foundational to modern cosmology. Von Mertens will speak to the reverberations of Leavitt’s groundbreaking discovery, her creative methodologies, and the cultural context surrounding her work, as well as how appreciating Leavitt’s skill at attention helped Von Mertens cultivate her own. Looking—truly seeing—is an active and inventive process, which requires constant reimagining, relevant to both scientific and artistic practices. Von Mertens’s talk will be illustrated with a wealth of imagery: details of artworks the artist made in response to Leavitt's legacy; examples of the glass plate photographs of the night sky Leavitt studied; and historic photos of the unique community of women, now known as the Harvard Computers, who worked alongside Leavitt. Please join us for this lecture celebrating the significance of Henrietta Leavitt’s discovery and the richness of its inheritance.
About our speaker:
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.
This event will be hybrid and takes place at the RAS Lecture Theatre at Burlington House, Piccadilly as well as online via Zoom. It will also be livestreamed on our YouTube channel.