Anna Von Mertens

Artist and Author
A photograph of Anna Von Mertens looking out at the viewer and smiling. She has short curly hair and is sitting at a drafting desk with a drawing on it. In the back ground you can see another drawing of her's that is a purple crystal ball emoji.
Her Artist Website

Anna Von Mertens is a visual artist and author of the newly published book, Attention Is Discovery: The Life and Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt. The book is the culmination of Von Mertens’s nearly decade-long collaboration with the Harvard Plate Stacks about the life and work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt. The book takes a multifaceted approach to exploring the archive and the ways we acknowledge the labor of women. Von Mertens’s book is the next seminal text to follow Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe in telling this history through exhaustive research for the general public. Von Mertens's book is an expansion of a 2018 exhibition commissioned by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute titled Measure. Her artwork has often taken gendered forms of art making—like quilting and embroidery—and utilized them to highlight aspects of scientific inquiry. From nuclear physics and deep-sea discovery to charting the movements of stars across the sky, Von Mertens has used these labor-intensive mediums to create a complex commentary on modern discoveries. In one of her works she hand-stitched the star trails seen from the location and time that Leavitt was born paired with a second quilt of the stars above the place and time of Leavitt’s death, this bracket of light holding a space in between for the viewer to ponder the exquisite life that she lived and the reverberations of her discovery. In subsequent work, Von Mertens created hyper-detailed drawings of glass plate negatives from the same plates Leavitt studied. Each of these large drawings can take hundreds of hours and requires the same skill of attention that Leavitt possessed. At a passing glance, someone might mistake them as magnified photographs of the actual objects, but closer inspection reveals the presence of the hand. This interaction with her artwork mirrors the public understanding of Leavitt’s scientific discovery, which might seem like a mere stepping stone when it, in fact, forms a cornerstone of modern cosmology.

 

Anna Von Mertens is a visual artist and author. She received 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.