The painting showed Alan Shepard clutching his helmet. Shiny silver suit. Blue eyes staring right at you. It was 1961. Bruce Stevenson had just captured the first US astronaut looking like a generic American hero.
James Webb, then NASA’s chief, looked at it and had an idea. Art belongs in space too. Not just for decoration but for perspective. He started a program in 1962. James Dean ran it until 1974. Later, Dean became the first art curator at Washington’s Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He brought about 2,000 NASA pieces with him. The collection is bigger now. Over 8,000 works. Alexander Calder is there. Henry Casselli. Annie Leibovitz. Norman Rockwell. Alma Thomas.
Why bother with an art gallery next to rockets? The museum is packed. People come for the Wright Flyer. Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. The Apollo 11 capsule. It makes sense. But art? Carolyn Russo, who curates the collection, gets it.
“Flight originated from the imagination.”
Artefacts tell us how they flew. Art tells us how it felt. There is a human dimension there. One you can’t get from a blueprint.
Take Rockwell. He was the king of the wholesome Saturday morning vignette. Then Look magazine hired him in 1964. They wanted to sell the moon to ordinary Americans. The task was hard. Space was terrifying. Unknown. Rockwell had to make it safe. Palatable.
He painted Man’s First Step on the Moon three years before anyone actually stepped there. He used a NASA model. He got it wrong. The spacecraft was the wrong shade. An astronaut was standing precariously on top. Silly details now. In 1967? It was prophecy.
Rockwell wasn’t always a cheerleader though. The Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts. It chilled him. In a speech draft before the 1969 landing, he asked if space was a lunatic idea.
“Is it a lunatic idea when we have poverty? Racial injustice? The Vietnam war?”
He wanted the money fixed here. On Earth. But he painted Apollo and Beyond anyway. He included the engineers. The wives. Wernher von Braun. They all looked up. United. Hopeful despite the doubt.
Alma Thomas saw it differently. She taught junior high in Washington for 35 years. She watched launches on her color TV. The machine age set her creativity in motion. Her painting Launch Pad uses vertical lines of bright, natural colors. The gantry at Kennedy Space Center merged with the Florida swamp. Blast Off looks like a violent pyramid of orange and yellow fire. Astronauts’ Glimpse recalls the “Blue Marble” photo from 1972. Blue dashes woven with orange. Pink. Red. Green. A wish for harmony? Maybe.
Georgia O’Keeff went on her first commercial flight in 1959. She looked down at blue rivers. She abstracted them into Blue A. It was so good NASA used it on their opening poster in 1973. Wait, 1976 actually.
Then there is fabric. Catherine Stewart’s Katherine Johnson Dress (2020) honors the black mathematician. She did the orbital calculations that made the missions possible. The dress is covered in celestial coordinates. Imaginary wear for a party that never happened.
Man Ray was a surrealist. His moon landing interpretation looks like chaotic scribbles at first glance. A vortex. A tornado of emotion. Russo likes it because it captures the mental storm of that day. Not just the science.
But no one cared about flight like Robert Rauschenberg.
The current exhibit, The Ascent of Rauschenberg, proves his obsession. Thirty works. Many unseen. He wanted to help the Wright Brothers fix their bicycle wings. That is how he thought about aviation. He worked with Dean. Dean called him “Bob” in letters.
Rauschenberg didn’t just paint rockets. He used the trash of the industry. Discarded airplane parts. Cardboard turkey boxes turned into birds in flight. Trust Zone mixes a spacesuit outline with the fragile structure of the Wright flyer. He respected the engineering but elevated the junk.
Look at Star Quarters. Pegasus has real airplane wings. The constellation Hercules? Muhammad Ali the boxer. The Gemini twins are aligned with actual astronomical charts. He did his research. But the hodgepodge is the point.
The smallest piece in the museum is the most distant. The Moon Museum wafer. A ceramic tile from 1968. Tiny. Forrest Myers organized it. It featured drawings from the era’s biggest names. Warhol. Oldenburg. David Novros. Rauschenberg just drew one pencil line.
What does a single line mean? Eternity. Or maybe just starting a blank canvas.
NASA sent one of these tiles on Apollo 12 in 1969. It is sitting on the Moon. Still there. Waiting. It is the furthest piece of art humanity has made. No one has visited it yet.
We leave it there for future discovery. Or maybe we just forgot why we went in the first place. 🌑
