Art Rising

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Lunar Codex Boarding Pass from the first Orion Launch 2022

One of my favorite cartoons in the New Yorker magazine is an image of a lunar rover up on concrete blocks, and in the near distance, little moon-men running off with the tires! Perhaps someday, far in the future, traffic between the earth and moon colonies will be an everyday thing, and lunar residents will travel around, not to strip parts, but to visit and take selfies of the multitudes of robotic rovers and landers that are being sent there in our lifetimes.

For the moment, we are quite excited by some of the current science traffic which is carrying, on seven separate missions, Lunar Codexes, or libraries, of representative examples of some of the art being created in our time. They are named the Orion, Peregrine, Nova, Serenity, Minerva, Polaris and Freya Collections.

The first art to arrive on the moon did so in 1969 without the permission or knowledge of NASA—a subversive move by six of the leading artist…