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Artist Talk: Anna Von Mertens

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mar 19

Wed, Mar 19 2025, 7:30PM - 9PM

Timken Hall | 145 Hooper St, San Francisco, CA, 94107 View map

Part of event series: FINE ARTS DIVISION//SPRING 2025//OPPORTUNITIES FOR CONNECTION

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Organized by

Graduate Fine Arts

Event description


CCA Graduate Fine Arts invites you to an artist talk with Anna Von Mertens (CCA MFA 2000) textile artist, researcher and writer. Join us as we welcome her back to celebrate her new book "Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt", published in 2024 by MIT Press.


Artist Bio:

Visual artist and author Anna Von Mertens is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Public Understanding of Science and Technology book grant in support of Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, published by the MIT Press in 2024. The book is an expansion of Von Mertens’s 2018-2019 exhibition at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, which traveled to the University Galleries of Illinois State University and Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in 2023. She received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studied dark matter as a structuring force in our universe, and a United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Arts. Her labor-intensive artworks use material intelligence as a lens to see science and history and have been widely exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Berkeley Art Museum; RISD Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery; Aspen Art Museum; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, and National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design in Oslo, Norway. The artist is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon.


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Entry details

Free and open to the public.