Palomar (Part 1)

The sun was formed 4.6 billion years ago. It takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for its light to travel to Earth.

The calendar as we know it, based on cycles of the solar year, was first implemented four and a half centuries ago in 1582.

Days still track our planet’s rotation. Years follow our orbit around the sun. Months originally matched lunar cycles.

The average human life span equals 26,784 nights or sunrises. In some places, where people watch the sky for other reasons, it’s 12,000 less.

The oldest person on record lived 122 years. The oldest living now is 115.

The clock is a device that constitutes time as it measures it.

Time used to be local, based on the sun’s position. That changed on “The Day of Two Noons,” in 1883, when U.S. railroads adopted standardized time zones.

Four people who woke up this morning can say they’ve been on the moon. No one has stood there since 1972.

Up to 6500 stars are visible to the naked eye at any one location. In most cities around the world, one sees only a fraction of this.

Palomar Observatory, on a California mountain, once had the largest optical telescope in the world. It lost the title in 1976, but it’s still used to observe celestial objects. Its name means place of the pigeons.

In the eighties, Italo Calvino wrote a book about a man who shares his name with that place: Mr. Palomar, a seeker of the cosmic in the commonplace, and unflagging, if absentminded, observer.

Physicists posit that how we perceive time is an illusion. The lessons of relativity and quantum gravity: time is not a universal, linear flow.

On April 1, 2026, NASA launched Artemis II, the first crewed lunar mission in fifty-four years. For the ten-day voyage, four astronauts flew around the dark side of moon before returning home.

We can predict where all the stars in the sky will be a hundred years from now.

There isn’t a good count for the number of fireflies every summer, but it’s easily in the hundreds of millions, or more. They appear right before sunset and live for just a few weeks.

Once there were 3 to 5 billion passenger pigeons flying overhead in America. Now there are none.

Palomar is a group exhibition about watching the sky, something that appears deceptively simple at first. Featuring twenty-eight artists, it unfolds in two parts, each five weeks long. Some works remain in place while others come and go, this encounter in time acting like a double exposure. Gradually, the familiar act of looking up spills over into a sense of life that is more layered and complex, or even contradictory. It turns out there is a lot at stake in the space above us.

Decades ago, after the launch of the first satellite into orbit, humans had big dreams of leaving the Earth. Politicians, poets, and scientists made public comments in this spirit. Today it’s mostly billionaires who talk of escape, or of mining the planets out there. The rest of us look to the sky from the ground as life carries on. An earlier age of optimism around space exploration and human progress has given way to successive new eras, as the stars fade from view in our cities, new technologies emerge with unsettling effects, and those in power surveil from above. Through it all, the sky is a steady presence. The sun rises and sets. The moon, too. The stars come out, where you can see them. We organize our lives by these patterns. They infuse our concepts, our sense of time, and our language, even when they’re not on our minds.

Part 1 of Palomar introduces certain celestial rhythms and cycles, while thinking about astronomy and other forms of observation in everyday life. It also begins to draw out experiences of time, as it is marked, measured, and perceived. Part 2 brings into view changing relationships with technology and the militarization of the skies. Both parts are shadowed by the question of what one sees and what one doesn’t, and the roles that images play, especially photographs, often wrapped up with the comforts and discomforts of distance.

The exhibition borrows its title from the name of an observatory on a California mountaintop, which once had the largest optical telescope in the world. It lost that distinction in 1976, but it is still used to study the stars. In the eighties, Italo Calvino wrote a book about a man who shares his name with that place: Mr. Palomar, a seeker of the cosmic in the commonplace and an unflagging, if absentminded, observer. Together, these two touchstones evoke different kinds of observation and attention.

Looking overhead can be a way to understand one’s place in the world, as it has been for thousands of years. Given the many ways people watch the sky or look to the cosmos, from scientific study to the habits of daily life, there are just as many different things to think or feel. The movement of the heavenly bodies offers a measure of continuity in the face of destabilizing change; the view above can be a source of solace, a realm of startling beauty, a reminder of something larger than oneself. The sky can also be a dark premonition, a site of violence or grief, a reminder of what there is to lose, or for many what is already gone. Sometimes it’s all of this at once.

Curated by Karsten Lund.

Lead support for this exhibition is provided by School Museum Fund, The Hees Family.

Friends of Palomar Patron Circle: Maria Christina & Guy-Karim Caland Puymartin, and Zach Smith.

Renaissance Society programs are supported by Teiger Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.