“25 Variable Stars”: Ligia Bouton on the Legacy of Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Ligia Bouton. "25 Variable Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt." Kendall/MIT Northbound MBTA temporary headhouse. June, 2024. Photo credit: Kayleigh MacDonald
Artist Ligia Bouton was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil and was raised in London, England. A multimedia artist, she combines sculpture with performance, digital art, photography, and video. She holds degrees in Fine Arts from Vassar College (Bachelor of Arts) and Rutgers University School of Arts (Master of Fine Art). She is currently a Professor of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College Department of Art Studio in Massachusetts. Her works have been exhibited at the Crystal Bridges Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Guildhall Art Gallery in London, Minneapolis Institute of Art, SITE Santa Fe, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Bellevue Arts Museum, the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, Copenhagen Contemporary, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2016, Bouton’s artwork was included in the exhibit “Charlotte Great and Small,” which celebrated the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire, England.
Her current exhibit “25 Variable Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt”, is on show at the Kendall/MIT station of the Boston Subway until June 2025. The exhibit is a tribute to the life and work of Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt (b. July 4, 1868; d. December 12, 1921) who studied the Cepheid stars and found out that their pulses were predictable. Leavitt documented the size of each star in the Cepheid cluster and how quickly they pulsed which led to the method of measuring far distances in the universe. The method, known as Leavitt’s Law, was eventually used by Edwin Hubble to prove that there are multiple galaxies in the universe. Leavitt’s contribution to astronomy is largely unsung though groundbreaking and changed the way scientists and laymen conceptualized the universe.
Bouton’s tribute to Leavitt puts at the forefront women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and the Arts. This roster of women in science and the arts includes Mary Shelley, who wrote the first science fiction novel Frankenstein, botanist and paper artist Mary Delaney, Anna Adkins, who depicted marine plant life in otherworldly cyanotypes, and architect Zaha Hadid, among many others. Though the two fields are sometimes at odds with one another, women scholars have contributed to create an intersection between the sciences and the arts that highlights a well-rounded scholarship and genuine curiosity for the world around and beyond us.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt, age 30 (July 4, 1868 – December 12, 1921). Photo: Public Domain
Zeny Recidoro-Fesh: What is your story? How did you become an artist?
I had a nomadic childhood living in several countries across the world. I also struggled with learning differences. As a child, art class was always the place where I felt the most at home. As I got older, I began to work for artists as a studio assistant and I became very aware of the difference between being a professional artist and continuing to make work I enjoyed in my spare time. I made a conscious decision that I wanted to be an artist as my career and I pursued opportunities that would facilitate that. A big part of that was also embracing teaching and realizing that mentoring young artists is a huge part of my work and what I think is important.
ZRF: How did you come upon Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s body of work and what particularly inspired you to create artworks that celebrated her as a scientist?
In March 2020, I was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship to do research at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Of course, this research was immediately interrupted by the global Covid-19 pandemic and there was a long period where I was corresponding with both the curators in the Glass Plate Stacks and the Wolbach Library at the Harvard Observatory. I already knew that I wanted to work with Leavitt and her research. I had done a tour of the glass plate photograph archive in 2019 and I was completely blown away by the images of distant galaxies and stars captured on the glass plate photographs. But, it ultimately was Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s handmade “fly spanker” tools that stuck with me. Leavitt created these objects to be able to accurately gauge the relative luminosity of the stars she was studying - but it is the humor of the name that she gave this tool along with the careful and innovative construction of these objects that I really admired.
ZRF: What has drawn you to installing this piece in places of transit, particularly the Kendall/MIT MBTA station in Cambridge and also in the Copenhagen airport? What were some of the decisions you made in how each of those installations was made?
I realized quickly that public spaces were ideal for the lenticular images that I was making in my project, ”25 Variable Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt.” In a space where everyone is in motion around the image, the lenticular will activate simply by the nature of how we as the public exist in that space. I also realized that the architecture of public transportation is all about facilitating motion and therefore is an even more perfect space for lenticular images that only change as you move around them.
The curators I was working with in Copenhagen on “25 Variable Stars” were interested in trying to work with the public transportation providers across the city, and although we worked for about six months to get permission to install the pieces on bus shelters, in the end, we weren’t able to make it work. They were able to negotiate the use of the digital screens at the Copenhagen Airport and over the space of two weeks, a video animation of several of the stars was shown for about 15 seconds every hour. Simultaneously with the lenticular images, I had been working on these video animations. Their effect is very different from the lenticular prints and ultimately not as successful.
When I came back from Copenhagen, I immediately went to work creating a proposal to bring the project to Boston. I focused on spaces within the MBTA subway system. Although the MBTA does not currently have an active arts program, I felt certain that given Leavitt’s connection to Harvard, Cambridge, and the larger Boston area, I wanted the project to be shown here and to share it with this community. I created a full proposal for the project and started to call various offices at the MBTA trying to figure out who I could email the document to.
It was a super interesting process. All the folks I talked to at the MBTA were really generous and thoughtful. The logic of why this project was meaningful to the local community was immediately clear to each of these people. Finally, I ended up talking with Birgit Wurster, the Wayfinding Designer for the MBTA. She had recently walked through the temporary entrance for the Kendall/MIT station and saw potential in the space for the installation of some kind of artwork.
From there the project moved quickly to where we are today. All 25 star portraits are hung in the entrance tunnel, along with information panels with a QR code that links to an extensive website with lots of information about Leavitt, the history of the Harvard Observatory and the Center for Astrophysics, and my work and process for this project.
Ligia Bouton. 25 Variable Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Kendall/MIT Northbound MBTA temporary headhouse. June, 2024. Photo credit: Kayleigh MacDonald
ZRF: Could you describe your approach to an archival project, especially for an archive as vast as the Harvard Observatory glass plate catalog? How do you find the contact points between the source material and your own practice?
At the start of the project, I visited the Harvard Archives and the Wolbach Library several times as we started to come out of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown to look at Leavitt’s letters and her meticulous notebooks. I was looking for evidence of Leavitt’s personality and a window into her thought process.
There are not very many letters, to be honest. In most of the letters in the Archives, Leavitt writes to her boss, Professor Edward Pickering (Director of the Observatory from 1877-1919) when she is away from work to fill him in on the progress that she is making with her research from afar. She is very professional in all of these correspondences and therefore the letters don’t contain almost any personal information.
Her notebooks are also highly detailed, extremely neat, and clearly laid out. However, again, there are few hints about who Henrietta Leavitt was as an individual.
Ultimately, it was Leavitt’s research itself that was the most interesting to me, and in her published papers I found the clearest record of her interests and her passions. I knew that I wanted to do something with the 25 stars that Leavitt used to illustrate the period-luminosity relationship she discovered in Cepheid variable stars and which she used to lay out the first method for measuring relative distance in the universe. She documented these stars in her 1912 paper, “Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud.”
In this paper, Leavitt focuses on 25 Cepheid variable stars. These stars pulse - they transform from being small and dim to being large and bright - in a regular pattern. The stars Leavitt picked are all in the Small Magellanic Cloud, so Leavitt could assume that they were all roughly the same distance from Earth. What she realized was that all the small stars pulsed very quickly (over the span of 1-2 days) where the large stars pulsed very slowly (anywhere from 30 to 120 days).
I was also interested in the role that glass played in Leavitt’s research as I often use glass as a creative medium. Glass is an essential component of the telescope itself in the lenses that allow us to capture new views of the vast universe at the scale of the table top. Glass brought distant stars to Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s desk at the Harvard College Observatory through the lenses in the telescopes in Boston and in Peru. Glass is also the essential substrate that holds each of the photographic images captured by the telescopes.
Image 1 The artist, Ligia Bouton, in the Project Space studio at Visual Studies Workshop, 2023. Images 2,3 Ligia Bouton: 25 Variable Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Work in progress image, 2023. Photographs were taken by layering glass objects on top of glass lantern slides from the early 1900s. Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist
ZRF: Leavitt Swan's work has been the foundation for many astrophysics discoveries up to the present day. How did dialogue with working astronomers fold into your practice, if at all? How do you see this project in the broader art-science landscape?
Most of the work that I did for “25 Variable Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt” was done in the archives at Harvard. I worked with a few of the researchers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics when I had particular questions and they were really helpful and generous with their time. However, I didn’t have the chance to really dive into any contemporary astrophysics research. So, this fall I will be the artist-in-residence with the DARK Cosmology group at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. I am really excited to spend a three-month period working with the astrophysicists in this group. I am particularly interested in spectroscopy and the study of supernovae. I don’t know where this research will lead but am excited to explore an entirely new approach to my work.
ZRF: Who are your favorite artists—those you consider a great influence?
The two artists I am looking at the most right now are Marguerite Humeau and Firelei Báez. I love Humeau’s use of diverse materials, textures, and processes, and how her sculptures appear to grow in a natural way. Her research into biology and ecosystems is also really inspiring to me and I look to her when I am thinking about different strategies for working with research. Firelei Báez is in my opinion a contemporary master. I am in awe of the vibrancy and dynamic nature of her images. Her engagement with colonial history is also a powerful component of everything that she does.
ZRF: What were some of the challenges you faced in selecting the train station as a venue and then in going forward in installing it in the station? What do you find interesting or appealing in the temporary nature of the station?
Installing “25 Variable Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt” in the Kendall/MIT redline station temporary entrance was a very different experience for me. This is the first major public art project I have completed. Raising the funds for the project, as well as working with the MBTA and the project developers was a very time-consuming process. For about 8 months I was working solely on the administration of the project and I missed having more time in my studio to develop new work. For the actual installation, I worked with a wonderful group of contractors who helped solve many of the issues around securing the lenticular photographs in this public space.
The temporary nature of this project is also interesting. The main northbound station at Kendall/MIT is being renovated so the project will only be on display for a year while the temporary entrance is in use. Although I hope to find a permanent home for the project, I also am interested in the idea of temporary monuments. I think a lot about monuments and how only people in positions of power and privilege ultimately decide who we memorialize and remember and whose voices are silenced. By engaging in more temporary monuments, I hope the process of deciding which people and ideas we want to bring to the forefront can be more inclusive and democratic.
ZRF: What is the process of making a lenticular image?
Lenticular photography is a process by which two photographs are cut into thin strips and then combined by alternating the strips from each image into a new single image. Then a ridged or accordian lens material is laid over the surface of this combined image so when you are standing on one side you see one image and as you move to look at the image from the other direction you see the other image.
When I was in Copenhagen last year to install the project there I was thrilled to come across a painting done using this same technique. In a small room in the Rosenborg Castle, I found the Double Portrait of Frederik IV and his sister, Sophie Hedevig, completed 1692 by G.A. Bois-Clair. It is painted on an accordioned canvas so that as you walk around it you see first one likeness and then another. Although lenticular photography was not invented until the 20th century, the idea of an image that transforms through the motion of the viewer is much older.
Ligia Bouton. Star H. 1492 from 25 Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt, 2022-23. Lenticular photographic print (9 photographic layers). 30 x 30 inches. Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist
ZRF: Looking at the different directions you have gone using Henrietta Swan Leavitt's work as the source material including music and performance, what brought you to making these layered lenticular images?
At the start of this project, I began to play with strategies for a creative engagement that allowed for speculation about Leavitt’s more personal thoughts and desires. I employed a lot of performance strategies to work through my ideas. This is a pretty normal way that I get going on a complex project.
However, pretty early on I started to formulate the idea that I wanted to create a portrait of each star in Leavitt’s study - some kind of an image that would show how the Cepheid variable stars change over time. I wanted to find a way to animate each star's transformation rather than just imply it with still images.
I began to experiment with straightforward digital animation and also started researching other ways to create a moving or transforming image. I was able to do some small lenticular test prints very easily with commercial printers I found online. The first prints were actually created by Walgreens, who have a service that will combine 2 images together.
In these first lenticular images, I realized that it is the in-between state that is really important. The lenticular technology in effect allows you to see both images simultaneously and that is what gives the impression that you are moving fluidly from one state to the next over time. But, when I started out I was unsure if it was possible to create a lenticular image of more than 2 or 3 layers. In theory, it seemed to be possible, but I wasn’t sure what it would look like. It was important to the project that I figure out how to combine multiple layers as I wanted each star to directly reference Leavitt’s research. If the Cepheid variable star took 5 days to transform - I wanted there to be 5 photographs layered into the lenticular.
So I ordered the lenticular lens material and attempted to make multilayered images in my studio.
These first two test prints were pretty exciting. I had painstakingly spliced my photographs together with both 5 and 9 layers and although I was definitely having a hard time aligning the lens material, I could see that the images moved in a similar way to commercially produced 2-layer images that I was able to order from Walgreens.
So at this point, I realized I needed to work with someone who could not only produce the large-scale images that I wanted, but also had the technical expertise to combine anywhere from 5 to 30 photographic layers into a single image.
I eventually found a specialized lenticular printing company, and the owner there was totally game to work with me. We started making test prints at larger sizes and with multiple layers. This is the first test print that I ordered and when it arrived I was pretty blown away.
Ligia Bouton. Stills from initial performance experiments wearing the Henrietta Swan Leavitt green screen dress, 2022. Still image from digital video. Duration: variable. Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist
ZRF: What is your perspective on art making?
This is a really tough question - it is difficult to encapsulate everything that I think about the process of making. However, as an artist, I am interested in story-telling, and therefore research is an absolutely vital and intrinsic part of my process that creates an essential starting point for every project. For the greater part of my career, my work has been both grounded in and inspired by historical archives, with each set of documents affording me the opportunity to engage with the historical, political, and social narratives inherent in their collections.
ZRF: Is there anything you would like to impart to the girls and young women of today?
I think this is a hard time to be an artist in general. It is difficult to remember that in a time of political upheaval, genocide, and global war and conflicts, cultural production is really important. Artists' voices can operate as a reminder of our collective humanity. You never know when you are going to reach someone else and how a stranger finding wonder, joy, or empathy in the art you have made can make a difference in their life.
Ligia Bouton
Star H. 1492 from 25 Stars: A Temporary Monument for Henrietta Swan Leavitt, 2022-23
Digital animation gif (9 photographic layers) Duration: 5 seconds (repeating)
Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist
Published August 28, 2024 | Women in the Arts, Inc.