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Henrietta Leavitt, a century ago, worked at the Harvard College Observatory studying glass plate photographs of the night sky. Her aim was to determine the brightness of stars, gauging one star—one speck of emulsion—at a time. Her findings provided a tool to measure stellar distances. The shape of our galaxy was revealed, as were galaxies beyond our own.
In stitches and graphite, Anna Von Mertens reimagines Leavitt’s patient work. Her hand-stitched quilts bind together small, embodied gestures with vast ranges of space and time. The diptych on display traces the arc of stars across the sky at dawn on the day of Leavitt’s birth and at dusk on the day of her death—the span of Leavitt’s life held in between. Four quilts translate cosmological data, offering rotated perspectives on the gravitational boundary of our galactic supercluster: the largest known structure in the universe, and the farthest reach of Leavitt’s foundational work.