Opening Talk: Dario Robleto on Science, Art, & the Search for Meaning

Information about the exhibition, The Heart's Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto

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For Dario Robleto, the practice of art shares a key aspiration with scientific endeavor: both the artist and the scientist strive to increase the sensitivity of their observations. In her contribution to The Heart’s Knowledge catalogue, Dr. Jennifer Roberts (Professor of the Humanities, American and Contemporary Art, Harvard University) writes that “the act of measurement cannot be separated from the search for meaning.” What are the tools that artists and scientists use to observe and measure our world? How might we use those tools to construct new pathways of human understanding across time and distance? How might shared values of empathy, care, and curiosity guide such pursuits?

In this opening conversation, Robleto and Roberts will be joined by Lucianne Walkowicz, astronomer and the co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance, and Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts and curator of The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, to reflect on these questions. Join us for a discussion that reaches across boundaries to examine the shared pursuit of greater understanding that binds artists and scientists.

Drop by The Block anytime from 12-1:30pm and join the Block Museum Student Associates in the galleries for a look at the exhibition, beforehand.

About Program Participants

Jennifer L. Roberts is Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, where she teaches art history and material culture with an emphasis on the interface between the arts and the natural sciences. She is the author of numerous books and essays on American art and science from the eighteenth century to the present, and has also curated exhibitions in modern and contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. In spring of 2021, she delivered the 70th Annual A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts for the National Gallery of Art, with a series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print. She is currently focusing on initiatives to create alliances between the humanities and the STEM fields at Harvard and beyond, and is co-authoring a book with Robleto titled Life Signs: The Tender Science of the Pulsewave.

Lucianne Walkowicz is an astronomer, artist, and activist. As co-Founder of the JustSpace Alliance, Walkowicz studies how outer space serves as the site where humanity crafts its futures, and works to make those futures more just (both in space, and on Earth). Over their 20+ years in astronomy, Walkowicz has contributed to major astronomical projects such as the Hubble Space Telescope, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, NASA's Kepler Mission, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Their astronomical research seeks to understand where and how we might discover alien life in the universe, and how stars influence a planet's suitability for life. An organizer both within and outside STEM, they work towards social justice in the sciences and beyond, and use popular communication to foster knowledgable, empowered publics. In 2014 they became an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium, where they worked until 2022.