NASA EXHIBIT: Arts center goes to infinity and beyond

In 1962, only four years after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created, the space agency invited a group of artists into its celebrated but close-knit world.

More than 200 artists and musicians participated in the NASA Art Program, which has amassed a collection of 2,500 works. The archive embraces a dizzying array of iconic artists, including Norman Rockwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Laurie Anderson, Jamie Wyeth, Annie Leibovitz, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik and William Wegman.

“NASA/ART: 50 Years of Exploration” pays tribute to that program — and space travel itself — in a traveling exhibition of 73 works from the collection. The exhibition opens at the Fine Arts Center with a reception Friday night and runs through March 7.

“Despite all the photography coming out of the space program, they realized that drawings and painting would connect with the public more,” says museum director Blake Milteer.

In that spirit, he has included four ancillary shows by muralist Eric Bransby, Denver painter Vance Kirkland, multi-media artist Monica Petty Aiello and video artists Mike Laur and Rick Mazzola.

The museum will also offer an impressive lineup of other programming, including a lecture by shuttle pilot Richard Truly, a film series, family activities, classes and a trip to Denver with performing arts director Alan Osburn to see the world premiere of the play “When Tang Met Laika.”

“For anyone not inclined to go to a museum,” Milteer says, “they might find something that they’ll like here.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “the sky is the ultimate art gallery just above us.” Now, perhaps, it doesn’t have to be.

MIKE LAUR AND RICK MAZZOLA

Show: “Looking Up”

This isn’t exactly art, says Mike Laur, who, with Motion Picture Lab partner Rick Mazzola, created a two-paneled video work that hangs at alarming angles on the ceiling of the Steiner Family Gallery.

Projected moving images will churn on each of the 15-by-9-foot panels — some of the pair’s creation and some from NASA sources like the Hubble Telescope. Some of the technology involved in making it work has never been used this way before, he says.

It’s about the experience, Laur says, of being engaged with the awesome, silent beauty and unsolvable mysteries of space.

“We’re not trying to pose political, scientific or cultural or philosophical questions,” he says. “The take away, I hope, is people will say ‘Wow,’ and that what we’re doing in space is not only hugely important but should be pursued more rigorously that we have.”

MONICA
PETTY AIELLO

Show: “Frozen/Inferno”

They are intense, both macroscopic and microscopic. These paintings of acrylic, paper, ink, gel and fiber gleam as if water coated a surface crusted with an alien kind of life.

But is “Frozen/Inferno” an up-close view of an over-populated Petri dish or pieces of the cosmos, the surface of some moon near enough to touch?

It’s hard to tell actually.

Ask the Denver artist and she’ll tell you that they’re based on the surfaces of two moons of Jupiter: the volcanic Io and Europa, which is fractured by ice.

To create these densely layered images, Monica Petty Aiello relies on natural forces like heat, air, gravity and water. Like an alchemist hell bent on creating snow globes for unimaginable worlds.

“My first love as a child was astronomy,” Aiello says. “I’ve always been fascinated by other worlds, and fortunately my life has paralleled the development of planetary science.

“Now, we are lucky to have amazing images and information about our planetary neighbors due to the wondrous robotic explorers we have sent throughout our solar system.

“I’m awestruck by these distant worlds and enjoy capturing them in works I really consider to be ‘landscapes,’ albeit unfamiliar terrain.”

ERIC BRANSBY

Show: “The History of Navigation”

The year before man stepped on the moon, Colorado Springs painter Eric Bransby finished a commission for the U.S. Air Force Planetarium: In his eight-panel, 30-foot-long tribute to man’s inextinguishable need to explore, he takes the viewer from mastering the sea to reaching into space.

The panels, which are on loan from the Air Force Academy, are angular style. Figures and objects vibrate with purpose. Man not only fits in this world, but conquers it.

Museum director Blake Milteer points to a panel depicting the use of an orbital telescope and another that looks like a base on the moon.

“He sort of foretells what we take for granted now,” says Milteer of Bransby, who studied with Thomas Hart Benton, Boardman Robinson and Josef Albers. He contributed to the renovation of Robinson’s mural over the FAC entrance. “It’s kind of amazing.”

VANCE
KIRKLAND

Show: “The Mysteries
of Space”

They explode. In frantic color. In careful form. In the perfect Sweet Tart dots and candy buttons, like Pointillism writ large.

Vance Kirkland called them “Nebula Abstractions,” a series the noted Colorado painter started in 1954 and continued until his death, in Denver, in 1981.

They are universes of imagination, he said. The Big Bang of personal creation.

“The paintings may suggest ideas of time and space,” Kirkland said.

“I think a great deal about what could have happened and how little we know about the universe in which we live, and the fragment of time that can be called known history of the Earth.  … I am trying to paint something I do not know exists in a tangible way. If I am looking at space, who is going to say it never existed? It has existed in my mind.”

“NASA/ART:
50 Years of Exploration”

When: Opens 5 p.m. Friday, with reception, and runs through March 7.

Where: The Fine Arts Center, 30 W. Dale St.

Admission: $10 non-members, $8.50 seniors, students and children 5 to 17, under 5 free; reception admission $15 non-members, $5 members; 634-5583, csfineartscenter.org

Something else: Don’t miss the wide range of accompanying exhibitions, classes and programming created to riff on this exhibition.

HIGHLIGHTS

Go to csfineartscenter.org for details and other events.

6 p.m. Jan. 5: Film series kicks off the six offerings with “Forbidden Planet”

2 p.m. Jan. 16: Astronaut Richard H. Truly speaks

11 a.m. Feb. 6: A family gallery tour designed for kids ages 6-10 includes interactive activities and discussion

7 p.m. Feb. 19: “Psychoangelo,” a concert of creative music composed, improvised, or otherwise realized in the galleries