Now open until February 1, 2025, "Tom Van Sant: An Earth Twin at the Digital Dawn" is 18th Street Arts Center’s latest exhibition, diving deep into the life of the renowned conceptual artists and environmental groundbreaker. Van Sant, who kept a studio in Santa Monica for decades, is responsible for creating the first satellite composite map of the Earth free of clouds, changing the way the technology has been used ever since its debut in 1990.
The exhibit chronicles the storied past of Van Sant while also fostering conversations of assessing his work since the now-iconic GeoSphere "Earth from Space" Image was first shown to the public. The ambitious image led to projects such as The GeoSphere Project and an installation known as the "Earth Situation Room," imagery of the planet that could be used by world leaders to assess environmental impacts.
Van Sant first showed the Earth Situation Room project at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, a trip he took alongside colleagues such as 18th Street Arts Center Executive Director Jan Williamson. Williamson first recalled Van Sant being interviewed on local radio, and was excited enough to find the artist through the phone book. Soon after, she began working for him as an artist’s assistant for nearly five years.
Williamson said the exhibit idea was born from the 2024 Getty Pacific Standard Time theme of "Art & Science Collide," which she felt was an opportunity to pay tribute to Van Sant after his passing in 2023 at the age of 92. The project, she added, was the remedy to only speaking on environmental problems "on a very regional basis."
"As an artist who loved science and loved the environment, Tom wanted scientists, environmental activists, policymakers to have the best map that they could possibly have to talk about those global issues and really understand that our environment belongs to us all," Williamson said. "It’s not divided by these boundaries of country and so forth, it’s really something that belongs to everybody, and we all need to understand and take care of it."
The exhibit took long-term planning between 18th Street Street Arts Center, Cypress College and Van Sant’s alma mater, Otis College of Art and Design. Williamson worked alongside Otis College’s Creative Action Integrated Learning students, an undergraduate program that partners with community engagement projects.
Fitting all of Van Sant’s accomplishments, including his time as a pilot in the Korean War and his influence as the father of modern kite making, into one exhibit hall was not an easy task for the group; not to mention accurately assessing what GeoSphere accomplished.
"There was a lot for us to unpack because this project, 35 years on, it’s an interesting time to do an assessment, like what kind of impact did [GeoSphere] really have?," Williamson said. "So as you can see in the exhibition, we decided to create a timeline of Tom’s whole life, show his influences and inspirations."
The entrance to the exhibition hall may have an influence on locals, as a recent event entitled "Change The Future" invited participants to write post-it notes personalizing the issues they saw during the exhibit.
"We want people to have a sense of interactivity with these ideas and what they’re thinking about right now … [they wrote] about the environmental issues that are on the ballot, encouraging [others] to support them, or [to] communicate with your elected officials about it," Williamson added.
For more information about the exhibit, visit 18thstreet.org.
thomas@smdp.com
