All Stories

The healing power of art.

When Barbie first became an astronaut in 1965, she was more than a decade ahead of NASA sending a woman to space. Since then, there have been several versions of astronaut Barbie.

From Dante to Matt Damon, Percival Lowell to Perseverance, humans have long wondered about, studied, and eventually explored our closest planetary neighbor, Mars.

Sitting atop a pedestal in front of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is the abstract sculpture Continuum, 1976, by Charles O. Perry, known for his public art installations located at buildings, universities, and parks. Continuum is typically described as a Möbius strip, a star shooting through a black hole, a design inspired by geometry, or the continuous flow of the universe.

In 1969, nearly 600 million people tuned in to watch the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Four of these rapt viewers were a family of Indian immigrants in Delaware. Four months later that family was driving through Ohio and decided to stop and knock on Neil Armstrong’s parent's door.

A study of Chesley Bonestell's mural "A Lunar Landscape."

With the Museum’s west-end galleries re-opening, two murals by artist Eric Sloane will be on display. The Earth Flight Environment mural was re-installed in the lobby and a lesser-known mural titled Weather Mural is displayed again for the first time in almost 40 years. Both murals emphasize artist Eric Sloane’s integral role in communicating the relationship between weather and flight through art.

Museum curator Matt Shindell interviewed artist Rafael Vargas-Suarez, whose work engages with spaceflight, space technologies, and human futures. Examine his various artwork and what he has to say.

What connects you to the rest of the world? Photography exhibition Faces of Our Planet explores the human experience of living on Earth and how globalization impacts the cultural, community, and individual perspectives throughout different regions of the world.

When researching QueerSpace, we repeatedly saw creators blending themes of space and themes of queerness in their art. Many of these artists use their art to envision new futures. Futurist thinking uses the experience of the past and present to contextualize and reimagine what the future could be, often creating a future that’s more equitable and radically different than what we have now.