The Power of Space Art

One of the remarkable qualities of space art is its ability to amplify the mysterious intangibility of the cosmos (as with the late-nineteenth-century French artist Étienne Trouvelot) and at the same time make the unrealized technologies of the future and the worlds beyond our reach seem to be within our grasp (as with the mid-twentieth-century American artist Chesley Bonestell). As Carolyn Russo demonstrates in “How Space Art Shaped National Identity” (Issues, Spring 2024), art has played an important role in making space seem both meaningful and familiar.

Its appeal has not been limited to the United States. In the Soviet Union, the paintings of Andrei Sokolov and Alexei Leonov made the achievements of their nation visible to its citizens, while also showing them what a future in space could look like. The iconography developed by graphic designers for Soviet-era propaganda posters equated spaceflight with progress toward socialist utopia.

Outside of the US and Soviet contexts, space art from other nations didn’t necessarily align with either superpower’s vision. The Ghana-born Nigerian artist Adebisi Fabunmi, in his 1960s woodcut City in the Moon, provided a vision influenced by the region’s Yoruba people of community life on the moon. The idea of home and community may have appealed to the artist during an era of decolonization and civil war more than utopian aspirations or futuristic technologies. Meanwhile, in Mexico, the artist Sofía Bassi composed surrealist dreamscapes that ponder the connection between outer space and the living world. Bassi’s Viaje Espacial includes neither flags nor space heroics.

Contemporary space art is as likely to question the human future in space as it is to celebrate it. The Los Angeles-based Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin’s work is critical of plans for the moon and Mars that she worries continue colonial projects or threaten to despoil untouched worlds. Tossin’s digital jacquard tapestry The 8th Continent reproduces NASA images of the moon in a format associated with the Age of Exploration, reminding viewers that our medieval and Renaissance antecedents similarly sought new worlds to conquer and exploit.

Space is also a popular setting or subject matter in the works of Afrofuturist and Latino Futurist artists. These works often seek to recover and reclaim past connections as they chart new future paths. The American artist Manzel Bowman’s collages combine traditional African imagery and ideas with space motifs and high technology to produce a new cosmic imaginary unconstrained by the history of colonialism. The Salvadoran artist Simón Vega’s work reframes the Cold War space race via the perspective of Latin America. Vega reconstructs the space capsules and stations of the United States and the Soviet Union using found materials in ways that make visible the disparities between the nations who used space to stage technological spectacles and those who were left to follow these beacons of modernization.

The many forms that space art has taken over these past decades are surprising, but the persistence of space in art is not. From the moon’s phases represented in the network of prehistoric wall paintings in Lascaux Cave in southwestern France to the images of the heavenly spheres captured by medieval and later painters across many nations, art chronicles our impressions of the universe and our place within it perhaps better than any other cultural form.

Matthew Shindell