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From
Bruce Winslow, Director, A. B. Dow Museum of Science & Art
 A
little boy laid on his back in the grass gazing to the summer
sky, wondering beyond the silent clouds and thinking, “How can
there be no end? Infinity is impossible.” Through the eyes
of the Hubble Space Telescope we find Man quantifying the impossible…the
infinite…that which we assumed as unquantifiable. The impossible
is becoming so real as to redefine all we thought we knew about
our existence in the ever-expanding universe.
Heavens Above: Photographs of the Universe from the
Hubble Space Telescope treats us to approximately thirty never
before seen images of the most distant realms of the universe,
of nebula, stellar evolution, star clusters, star deaths, and
a unending system of galaxies. In a joint project between
the Midland Center for the Arts Hall of Ideas, Arts Midland: Galleries
and School and NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute, we present
a world premier of Hubble’s breathtaking photographs. Through
them we learn universal science but we also appreciate the reaches
of the universe for the first time in artistic terms. The
photographs unfold like the expanding atmospheric space in the
paintings of the Abstract Expressionists. The “space of dreams”
painted by Arshile Gorky, or the atmospheric paintings of Mark
Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Jenkins, and others, offer us
touchstones for enjoying these photographic explorations of phenomena
thousands of light years away.
The title of our companion exhibition, Cosmic Questions: Our
Place in Space and Time, addresses obvious questions we have
about the aspects of Cosmos…the characteristics of the universe.
But more so, these exhibitions pose ultimate staggering questions
about our very existence and place in it…the few key questions
that could change everything we might have ever believed to be
true. Indeed, Cosmic Questions! Might Cataclysmic
Question be a better phrase?
Through Hubble’s images and the work astronomical scholars world-wide,
we have reevaluated our entire picture of the Milky Way originating
about 10 billion years ago, growing to a collection of about 400
billion stars that are visible. We are now able to map it
three dimensionally. We have to begun the clarification
of vast galactic phenomena, quasars, magnetic fields, gravitational
interactions, the birth stars, and of how smaller galaxies are
absorbed by larger galaxies.
Hubble sends us new perspectives enabling better understanding
of the mysterious dark matter which comprises most of the mass
of the universe and shapes cosmic structures. It enables
the ability to even observe the nature of a black hole, an enormous
object so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravity
as it consumes stellar matter and explosively bellows forth x-ray
flares of immeasurable magnitude.
Through Hubble man is quantifying a macro-universe much the same
as he quantified the nature of our micro-universe in its atomic
terms of the electron, neutron and proton. Does this inverse
micro-space expand infinitely like the universal space that is being
demonstrated by Hubble. Be astounded, come see the Heaven’s
Beyond.
Vibrant.
Radiant. Miraculous.
View the raw beauty of the universe from above
the Earth's atmosphere.
See a portrait of the universe in exquisite detail. Be awed as
Hubble
watches galaxies engage in a dance of destruction. Observe an
icy world
far beyond Pluto in our solar system.
Download the Docent
Guide in PDF format (13 MB)
This exhibition is available for display at
your venue.
Email Bruce Winslow, Museum
Director
or call (989) 631-5930 ext. 1403 for more information
on bringing this exhibition to your venue.
Ready to bring this exhibition
to your venue?
Open and print the 26-page facility report and the 7-page
contract for submission.
Facility
Report (180k PDF)
Exhibition Contract
(110k PDF)
"Heavens Above"
Home page | Sample photos
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