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A portrait of trailblazing astronomer Henrietta Leavitt and an illustrated exploration of the power of attention in scientific observation, artistic creation, and the making of meaning. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has a diameter of about 100,000 light years--a figure we can calculate because of the work of Henrietta Leavitt (1868–1921), who spent decades studying glass plate photographs of the night sky. Visual artist and researcher Anna Von Mertens’s Interspersed with Von Mertens’s meticulously researched and lyrically written essays are collaborations with art historian Jennifer Roberts, cosmologist Wendy Freedman, astrophysicist João Alves, and novelist Rebecca Dinerstein Knight. Alongside Leavitt’s process, evident in her astronomical logbooks and ink notations on the glass plates, Von Mertens includes details of the hand-stitched quilts and graphite drawings that she made in response to Leavitt’s legacy. This interweaving of text and image engages and rewards the reader’s own close attention. Highlighting ways that subtle, repeated actions build meaning--whether skilled, technical observation, the crafting of an object, or the mundane tasks that construct our exquisite lives--Von Mertens’s pairing of close looking with close reading creates a layered portrait of Henrietta Leavitt that acknowledges the significance of her discovery and the richness of its inheritance.
About the author
Anna Von Mertens is the recipient of a 2010 United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Arts and a 2021–2022 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Her exhibition Measure, presented at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, traveled to the University Galleries of Illinois State University and Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.
