Ala Ebtekar: Thirty-Six Views of the Moon

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is a meditative collection of nighttime exposures made with book pages from texts referencing the night sky spanning the last ten centuries.

Drink wine and look at the moon and think of all the civilizations the moon has seen passing by…
— Omar Khayyam, 11th-century mathematician and poet

Taking his cue from Omar Khayyam’s poem, Ebtekar produces a vignette of windows to the moon, inviting us to shift the direction of our gaze. In his process, the artist works with a photographic glass plate negative of the moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California, treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate (cyanotype) to make the surface of the page light-sensitive. Then, Ebtekar exposes the pages overnight in the UV-light emitted by the moon.
This project challenges viewers to imagine the the moon looking at us, seeing ourselves as the objects of the moon’s billion-year gaze. There are four unique editions to the work, each produced under the moonlight of a season (i.e. winter, spring, etc.), and each with its own unique bibliography. The artist’s proof is the only edition made with moonlight from all four seasons over the span of one year.

For over two decades, Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978, Berkeley, CA) has situated his practice as a relentless leveling and collapsing of time and space. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe and time observing humanity. The artist’s extensive research and thoughtful methods borrow and physically rework thousand-year-old traditions of image/object-making up to the latest technological advances.

For over two decades, Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978, Berkeley, CA) has situated his practice as a relentless leveling and collapsing of time and space. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe and time observing humanity. The artist’s extensive research and thoughtful methods borrow and physically rework thousand-year-old traditions of image/object-making up to the latest technological advances.

A distinguished scholar of American culture, Alexander Nemerov explores our connection to the past and the power of the humanities to shape our lives. Through his empathetic, intuitive research and close readings of history, philosophy, and poetry, Nemerov reveals art as a source of emotional truth and considers its ethical demands upon us in our moment. Revered for his breadth of scholarship and celebrated for his eloquent public speaking, Nemerov inspires audiences with his belief in the affirming and transfiguring force of art.

An instinctive, nuanced author, Nemerov’s most recent book is The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s presenting tales of a visionary experience in the last years of America as a heavily forested land. His conjuring of a lost world of shade and sun has been praised by Annie Proulx ("deeply beautiful”, “astonishingly tender”, “one of the richest books ever to come my way") and Edmund de Waal (“moving and shocking and beautiful, an extraordinary achievement”).

Previous titles by Nemerov have gained further recognition: Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York was short-listed for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Biography; Summoning Pearl Harbor was praised by the novelist Ali Smith as "a unifying and liberating meditation”; Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine was short-listed for the Marfield Prize, a national award in arts writing; Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov, a meditation on his father, the poet Howard Nemerov and his aunt, the photographer Diane Arbus, was published in 2015; Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s was named one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles in 2013; Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War was a Choice Outstanding Academic Book; Icons of Grief: Val Lewton and 1940s America was praised by The New York Review of Books as "superbly original." Nemerov's first two books are The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America.

Nemerov, an engaging, eloquent speaker, gave the 2007 Andrew Wyeth Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, and in 2017, he delivered the 66th Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, becoming the first scholar to deliver them with a focus on American art.

Nemerov has also published two exhibition catalogues: To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, the companion to a National Museum of American Art exhibition of that name and Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic.

After receiving his B.A. in Art History and English with Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors from the University of Vermont and his Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University, Nemerov began his teaching career at Stanford University in 1992. Returning to Yale in 2001, Nemerov chaired the Department of the History of Art from 2009 to 2012 and in 2010 was named to the Vincent Scully Professorship. Nemerov returned to Stanford in 2012 as the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History from 2015 to 2021. The Stanford Daily has named him one of the university's top ten professors.

I study art and visual culture professionally, as well as maps, trails, and birds recreationally. Basically, I like looking at things and thinking about looking. 

My book, Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography, tracks 50 stylistic changes in the medium from its invention in the nineteenth century until the present day. Motion blur, lens flare, grainy film, and the low-angle portraits of the 1940s are a few of my favorite trends. I also love snapshots of picnics, people with their cars, and accidental pictures of the photographer’s own walking feet. (I take a lot of these.) The book was released in June 2020 by Stanford University Press. 

I also write about modern and contemporary art, visual culture, and writing. You can find links to essays and reviews on the Writing page. I teach art history at Stanford University. 

Ladan Akbarnia is Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at The San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA), where she oversees the permanent collection of holdings from South and Southeast Asia, Iran and Central Asia, and the Islamic world. Specializing in medieval Iran and Central Asia, her expertise and publications address cross-cultural transmissions; Sufism; Persianate drawings; contemporary Middle Eastern art; and methodologies of museum display. 

Before joining SDMA, she was Curator of Islamic Collections at The British Museum from 2010–19, where she was a lead curator for the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World and co-author of its accompanying publications. From 2007–10, she served as Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she organized a reinstallation of the Islamic collection and the exhibition, Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam, with its accompanying catalogue (2009). She also served as Executive Director of the Iran Heritage Foundation (2009–10) and as Consulting Curator for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture Museum Support Unit (2008–09). She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in the History of Islamic Art and Architecture.