Tuesday Night Lecture Series: Jennifer Roberts

As part of the Tuesday Night Lecture Series (TNLS), Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts presents a lecture by art historian, Jennifer Roberts, organized by the MFA Print Media & Photography program.

Roberts’ lecture, “The Pastel from Mars,” revisits a remarkable moment in 1965, when NASA’s Mariner 4 probe captured the first images ever transmitted from another planet. While the numerical data slowly processed into television images, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory improvised: they pinned the data strips to a wall, purchased a box of pastels, and hand-colored the image—creating a color-by-number drawing that became humanity’s first glimpse of Mars. This unexpected use of an eighteenth-century medium to visualize cutting-edge space technology offers new ways to consider visual representation both on and off Earth.

Jennifer L. Roberts is the X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences and the Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Her scholarship focuses on the intersections of art and the natural sciences, the history and theory of craft and materiality, and the history of print.