May 06, 2024Artist James Dean prepares sketches of the space shuttle Columbia as it sits on Pad 39 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on April 9, 1981, waiting for its first historic flight .In March 1962, NASA Administrator James Webb addressed a two-paragraph memorandum to NASA Public Affairs Director Hiden T. Cox about the possibility of bringing in artists to highlight the agency’s achievements in a new way.
“It’s amazing just how good a sketch pad is at getting you into places,” Dean said in a 2008 oral history interview. “People shy away from cameras, but sketch pads, pencils, paints, you know … a lot of doors got opened that you could never open by making an official request.” Though the grants and honorariums associated with being a NASA Art Program participant were always nominal – $800 in the 1960s and up to $3,000 in the early 2000s – many other well-known artists continued to work with the program through the decades that followed, including Norman Rockwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibowitz, and Chakaia Booker.
James Browning Wyeth, “Support,” 1965, watercolor on paper. The painting depicts the Gemini IV launch from the viewpoint of a neighboring gantry to the Gemini Launch Complex 19.Dean also recognized the importance of having a diverse range of artists present, even if they were all ostensibly there to capture the same historical event. “When you have six artists sitting together painting the same thing,” he explained, “each painting is different.
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