Dr. Ruth E. Morris Bakwin Art Lecture
Jennifer L. Roberts: The Pastel from Mars
The Wellesley College Art Department is pleased to welcome Jennifer L. Roberts of Harvard University to deliver the 2026 Dr. Ruth E. Morris Bakwin Art Lecture on Wednesday, March 4 in Collins Cinema. The talk, titled The Pastel from Mars, will detail Professor Roberts’ study of the first visualization of the surface of the red planet.
In July of 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe captured and transmitted the first images ever sent to Earth from another planet. While the numerical data was slowly downloaded and processed photographically, the eager 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. This impromptu pastel drawing was humanity’s first glimpse of Mars. The unexpected use of an eighteenth-century art medium to visualize data from 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. She is an art historian and photographer whose scholarship focuses on the interface between the arts and the natural sciences, the history and theory of craft and materiality, and the history of print. She is the author of several books, including Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (2004), Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (2014), and Contact: Art and the Pull of Print (2024).
Her latest teaching and research explores the reciprocity of art and astronomy, including a course about the moon, a multimedia project about the women who analyzed Harvard’s glass plate astronomical photographs at the turn of the twentieth century, and an essay about the first image transmitted from Mars. She also has a book forthcoming, co-authored with artist Dario Robleto, about the EEG and EKG signatures that were engraved into NASA’s Voyager Golden Record in 1977 and launched into interstellar space.