The work of nationally renowned artist Dorothea Rockburne will be featured in Dorothea Rockburne: The Astronomy Drawings in the Beard and Weil Galleries from Wednesday, March 18 through Friday, April 16.

March 4, 2009

The work of nationally renowned artist Dorothea Rockburne will be featured in Dorothea Rockburne: The Astronomy Drawings in the Beard and Weil Galleries from Wednesday, March 18 through Friday, April 16. The opening reception will be Wednesday, March 18, at 7 p.m.

The exhibition showcases the abstract painter's vividly colored works on paper, primarily done in watercolor and gouache. Her artwork, much of it geometric in nature, can be found in galleries all over the country, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. One of her floor-to-ceiling commissioned murals is at SONY Headquarters in New York.

She first came to Wheaton two years ago to lecture as a visiting artist. When she expressed interest in exhibiting here Wheaton's studio faculty welcomed the opportunity to show her work. And Ann Murray, professor of art and director of the Beard and Weil Galleries, pursued having the artist show her astronomy-inspired drawings.

"She has been interested for most of her life in science and math," said Murray, "even though she is quick to tell you that she is neither a scientist nor a mathematician, but rather an artist. But her work is very influenced by concepts and theories that she derives from physics and mathematics.

"You can see in her work that they are not trying to depict scientific theories in a literal fashion, but they suggest a lot about astronomical phenomena in many cases."

In an interview years ago, Rockburne talked about her attraction to astronomy: "Although I'm not a mathematician or a physicist, I am vitally interested in the mathematics and the physics which describe how the universe works. Since I'm a painter, I visualize and then one thought leads to another.... I have concentrated on astronomy, while simultaneously reading math and philosophy before going to sleep and on wakening. This has been a constant joy in my adult life."

The catalog for the exhibition features an interview with the artist conducted by Murray and Professor of Mathematics William Goldbloom Bloch, who has become a friend and admirer of the artist since she visited campus. The conversation focuses on the connections between mathematics, physics and Rockburne's art.

Rockburne, who was born and raised in Canada, studied art at the innovative Black Mountain College in the 1950s, before it closed. That's where her interest in math was sparked, Murray notes. "Interestingly, the curriculum at Black Mountain was a lot like ours. It was very much built on the idea of connections. So even though students went there to study art and creative writing, they had to take four years of math. And her math teacher was a very famous mathematician named Max Dehn, who was a friend of Albert Einstein. So she got very involved with math when she was there. That's how the art and math connection developed."

"With our own curriculum being built on the concept of connections, that made her very attractive because of her interest in the sciences as well as art," said Murray. "Just on the basis of her work, the studio faculty thought she would be a very good person to have."

Murray admits that not everyone-especially those in the math and science fields-gets the science angle of Rockburne's work. "That's the point. It's not supposed to be a literal representation of any particular theory. But she reads about the theory and ingests it all, and it comes out in the visual form in a way that is not formulaic but intuitive."

The Beard and Weil Galleries, located in Watson Fine Arts, are open from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday. The galleries are closed during college vacations.