An exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum explores the human instinct to understand the world around us. Nebulae: The Universe Unveiled features NASA photographs from the Webb and Hubble telescopes alongside works by local artists, prompting visitors to contemplate the night sky and contend with our place within the cosmos.
“Initially, it was one photograph,” Executive Director Suzanne de Vegh told GBH’s The Culture Show .
A board member had gifted a NASA image to the museum, inspiring staff to build an exhibition around it. They invited local artists interested in lunar and planetary phenomena to contribute original works.
“And then the surprise was that [the board member] gave us five more photographs!” de Vegh said. “So we had this vast richness, this array of beauty, and it gave us an opportunity to talk about the intersection of art and science.”
For scientists and artists alike, the process of interpretation is a deeply imaginative one.
“Everyone who tries to capture the sky in photography comes to realize there’s a creative act involved,” said Mark Munkacsy, president of the Astronomical Society of Southern New England and acting director of the observatory at UMass Dartmouth. “For the most part, you’re not trying to represent the thing in the sky the way the human eye would see it, especially with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is looking at wavelengths of light that the human eye can’t see. So you’re now in a creative act as a scientist trying to take this data that has come from cameras on the telescope. How do we present it to humans in a way that humans can look and can detect patterns that may be there in the data?”
Nebulae: The Universe Unveiled is on view at New Bedford Art Museum through March 9.
