Spaceflight and the Art of Vargas-Suarez Universal

Artists have engaged with concepts of space exploration and the future even before spaceflight became a technological possibility. At the National Air and Space Museum, our Collection includes thousands of works of art related to aviation and spaceflight, many of which imagine what our future in space will be or ponder what our relationship with space means. As much as curators work to preserve and understand the technologies of spaceflight and the stories of those who made it a reality, we also want to understand the cultural visions of spaceflight and its future produced by artists. With the support of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino, I worked with art historian Robb Hernandez to collect a set of oral history interviews with contemporary Latinx artists whose work engages with these themes.

One of the artists interviewed is Rafael Vargas-Suarez, who signs his work “Vargas-Suarez Universal.” Vargas-Suarez was born in Mexico City, Mexico, and grew up in Clear Lake City, Texas, a suburban city just south of Houston. Clear Lake City is a company town where the main industries are aviation and spaceflight. It is surrounded by NASA facilities, including the Johnson Space Center, home of NASA mission control, and the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory where astronauts prepare for spacewalks in a large underwater training facility.

Vargas-Suarez’s father had an aeronautics degree and worked in aviation, not spaceflight. But most of his friends and classmates had parents who worked at NASA, so he was always very aware of what NASA was doing. Vargas-Suarez not only heard about the projects his neighbors were working on, he also witnessed and experienced the human triumphs and tragedies that accompanied the space program. This experience, and the flight manuals and charts his father kept at home, influenced his art from a young age.

In college, Vargas-Suarez decided to pursue both art and science. He studied astronomy and art history at the University of Texas at Austin and then moved to New York City in 1997 to start his art career. Although he didn’t pursue science as a career, he realized the importance of his studies and background with science subjects for his artistic work. His art is derived from his curiosity about how things work, how they are made, and what they mean.

As a professional artist, Vargas-Suarez has remained connected to spaceflight and has conducted research for his body of artwork at many of the most important space centers in the world, including not only American facilities like the Johnson Space Center, Ames Research Center, Kennedy Space Center, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, but also the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. Vargas-Suarez directly engages with the people, places, and materials that take us to space with abstract artworks embedded with geometrical references.

Some of the artworks that caught Robb’s and my attention when we first researched Vargas-Suarez's work included a series of paintings that were started in 2007, depicting spacewalks on the International Space Station. Vargas-Suarez painted these works in tandem with the actual spacewalks. He developed a process where he projected the live video of the spacewalks from NASA’s website onto multiple screens in his studio, which resulted in turning the room into his own “mission control.” The artist lived on the astronauts’ schedule, followed their preparations and mission activities, and thought of them as his own “co-workers.” During the spacewalks, he traced the astronauts’ movements on the surface of the canvas as they happened in real-time. And to further connect the event to the canvas he used the same types of paint used on airplanes and rockets and incorporated other space materials, such as thermal blankets for the backing of the canvas.

Another artwork that we analyzed is a large mural of a Mars panorama as witnessed by one of the two Mars Exploration Rovers titled, Search for Life: Aliens, Water and Surveillance. Vargas-Suarez contributed this work to the 2008 exhibition, Claiming Space: Mexican Americans in U.S. Cities. He collected 25 gallons of mud from the Rio Grande River that marks the border between Texas and Mexico and applied the liquid earth as paint to create the image. Thermal blankets covered the walls above and below the rover image to further connect earthly and space materials. According to Vargas-Suarez, the mural presents an examination of how similar technologies are used by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the US Border Patrol to study Mars and to monitor the United States-Mexico border. These two types of searches are rarely talked about as related, and this mural asks viewers to question why. 

Today, Vargas-Suarez’s work continues to engage with spaceflight, space technologies, and human futures. His work was included in the 2021 Aerospace Corporation publication, Space and Art: Connecting Two Creative Endeavors. And his recent solo show, “Vector-Titlán,” on view at the Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary gallery in New York, features works created during the Covid-19 pandemic in his studio in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The exhibition speaks to the artist’s interest in the intersection of ideas and conversations about human migration and of Mars as a potential second home—including a series of Mars paintings, Mars Base, and Mars Polar Lander.