Erika Blumenfeld

The six prints in Erika Blumenfeld’s recent portfolio of works, Tracing Luminaries, draw the viewer in through their rich blue grounds, glittering gold overlays, and enigmatic inscriptions. Patterns of carefully rendered numerals, circles, lines, notations, and symbols are distributed across their surfaces. Each print exhibits a different design: some animated by webs of entangled lines and speckled fields of dots, while others have condensed areas of lines and arrows. Perhaps the most remarkable is a lone gestural mark—a swoosh—in the paper’s center. Each composition invites imaginative speculation, at times suggesting an astrological map, the shorthand of an inventor’s notebook, or the impression of shooting stars.

The marks are in fact notations of researchers, hired to analyze photographic images of the night sky taken at the Harvard College Observatory from the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. The meticulous notations were made on photographic glass plates, identifying stars and drawing relationships in space. These were done by a team of largely unheralded women researchers (known as “computers” before the word became associated with machines) whose analyses of tens of thousands of photographic negatives led to many breakthroughs in astronomy. Blumenfeld has transferred the marks without the stars themselves, thereby drawing attention to the human effort in exploring the universe.

Eric Lutz, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, Saint Louis Art Museum

(This is the introduction to the PROOF brochure essay about Erika Blumenfeld’s Tracing Luminaries project with Island Press. You can read the rest by clicking on the link just to the left on this page.)