Join artist Lia Halloran for a lecture exploring her two-decade studio practice at the intersection of art and astronomy. Halloran will trace how her early study of astrophysics as an MFA student at Yale laid the foundation for a body of work shaped by historical observatories such as Mount Wilson and by archival materials from Harvard Observatory, Caltech, and the Huntington Library, which continue to inform her painting, photography, video, and experimental darkroom work. Drawing on projects that center on overlooked scientific histories, she will discuss what it means to visualize the universe and to create the experience of it for a viewer, from long-exposure photographs of skateboarding to images made in dialogue with astrophysics. Across subjects as varied as flight, cabinets of curiosities, and vast caves of crystals, perception, time, and scale remain the enduring themes of her work.
Bio: Lia Halloran is an artist and educator whose work illuminates the overlooked contributions of women and queer people to astronomy, aviation, and the sciences. Working across painting, photography, video, and cyanotype, she draws on archival research and embodied experience to explore time, space, and identity, moving fluidly between the scale of the body and the vastness of the cosmos. With Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, she co-authored The Warped Side of Our Universe (Liveright/Norton, 2023). Halloran’s work is held in major collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, Simons Foundation, New York, NY, Harvard University, and the Norton Museum of Art, Caltech, Pasadena, CA and has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Art in America, The Boston Globe, and ARTnews among many others.
Halloran holds a B.A. in Art from UCLA and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. She lives and works in Los Angeles, is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and is Professor of Art at Chapman University, where she teaches painting and interdisciplinary courses that explore the intersection of art and science.