'Blue Moon': Student exhibition of cyanotypes featuring NASA lunar images lands at Brown
A collection of silk and cotton prints created by Brown University students and community members is on display at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts through Nov. 16.
1of6
Visitors to "Blue Moon" watched a short film documenting the community cyanotype-printing events and the history of the NASA Lunar Orbiter program. Photos by Nick Dentamaro and Maggie Spear/Brown University
2of6
A 60-foot-long silk scroll featuring images from NASA's Lunar Orbiter 2 hangs in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts as part of "Blue Moon," an exhibition on display through Nov. 16.
3of6
Janie Levin, a Brown Ph.D. candidate researching planetary geoscience, looked at photos from the cyanotype-printing events Logan Tullai held in late August, which she attended.
4of6
At the exhibition's opening reception, attendees snacked on Moon Pies and freeze-dried "astronaut ice cream."
5of6
Logan Tullai worked with an art installer to set up a crescent moon-shaped display of nine small cyanotype prints.
6of6
The multimedia exhibit is on display through Nov. 16
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — To offer the community a closer look at the Moon, Brown University senior Logan Tullai brought it down to Earth.
On the fourth floor of Brown’s Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, silk and cotton prints featuring images from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter missions decorate the walls and hang through the stairwells, while a documentary-style film offers context on the images’ genesis and production.
The prints, which are part of the exhibition “Blue Moon: Lunar Orbiter Silk Cyanotype,” were created over the course of two sunny days on Pembroke Field in late August, when Tullai invited members of the Brown community to participate in the printing process on campus through cyanotype, a photographic process invented in the 1800s that creates blue prints using ultraviolet rays.
Photos: With cyanotype, Brown student uses the sun to visualize the moon
Inspired by Chinese handscrolls and NASA film of the moon’s surface, senior Logan Tullai used an 1800s technique to lead a community art project on campus on 60-foot-long swaths of silk.
Tullai subsequently worked with staff at the Brown Arts Institute to develop and install the exhibition in the Granoff Center, where “Blue Moon” is on display through Saturday, Nov. 16.
At an early November reception for the exhibition, attendees snacked on Moon Pies and freeze-dried “astronaut ice cream” as they took in the scale of the images, some as large as 60 feet long and as small as 5 square inches.
An art installer hung a 60-foot-long cyanotype-treated silk scroll ahead of the exhibition's opening in the Granoff Center.
The exhibition marks the culmination of more than a year of work that began when Tullai created his first print using NASA film last fall, but his lunar exploration is far from over. He’s exploring artist grants — like the Brown Arts Institute student grant that helped support the creation of “Blue Moon” — as well as possible collaborations across the University with the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, the NASA LunaSCOPE initiative, and the Brown Summer High School program to offer educational programming for local K-12 students.
“I’m interested in working with students from Rhode Island, helping to introduce them to STEM and space through art,” Tullai said.
A double concentrator in political science and economics, Tullai is particularly interested in connecting communities through art and science, and plans to continue doing so throughout the rest of his senior year at Brown, and beyond.
“I’m thinking about a number of different things for what’s next, but I know for sure it’s something that I want to continue,” Tullai said. “I’ve found it’s a really fun way to bring people together.”
At the “Blue Moon” reception, one community member was particularly thrilled to be involved: Rita Cesario, manager of Laird Plastics in Warwick, Rhode Island, which provided an abundance of plexiglass for the campus printing event and the “Blue Moon” exhibition.
“I’ve helped support a lot of projects over the decades, but rarely am I invited to come see the final product,” Cesario said. “It means a lot to be here, and everything turned out so wonderfully.”
Following research, development and community collaboration, a team of Brown and RISD students unveiled “The Blind Urban Subject,” where passersby can experience the streetscape through common ocular conditions.
An open-to-the-public festival, from Oct. 24 to 27, will highlight Brown’s Lindemann Performing Arts Center as a premier site for orchestral music performance, experimentation and recording.
On view through Dec. 8, the new survey exhibition, “Franklin Williams: It’s About Love,” showcases the deeply personal paintings and sculptures the artist has created over the last six decades.
