Good Seeing

California artist RUSSELL CROTTY aims for the stars in a new exhibition at SJICA, of works created in collaboration with UC Santa Cruz and the Lick Observatory.

- Kim Beil

Russell Crotty has spent his career in search of “good seeing,” astronomy jargon for a clear, dark sky, or the conditions that favor viewing, which is at the core of his artistic practice. The exhibition, “Look Back in Time: Russell Crotty and Lick Observatory,” on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (SJICA) through February 26, represents the culmination of a multi-year artist-in-residence project organized by John Weber, director of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS), an interdisciplinary exhibitions and events forum that is part of the Arts Division at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Over the course of the residency, the IAS arranged for more than two dozen meetings between Crotty and members of Theoretical Astrophysics Santa Cruz, a faculty working-group at UCSC, and coordinated multiple visits to Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, a research site managed by the University of California. The result is an unusual exhibition that combines a mini-retrospective of Crotty’s astronomical drawings since 2002, as well as a new installation inspired by his conversations with physicists, plus a side gallery containing instruments and logbooks, which recreates the antiquarian atmosphere of the Lick Observatory’s historical collections. Completed in 1888, Lick was the first permanently occupied mountaintop observatory in the world, according to Tony Misch, director of the Lick Observatory Collections, who co-curated “Look Back in Time” with Weber and Crotty, in collaboration with Cathy Kimball, the SJICA’s executive director. Drawing together these disparate elements and sites of Crotty’s practice makes visible the degree to which his art-making involves much more than marks on paper.