National Air and Space Museum marks 50 with space-focused art exhibition

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is marking its 50th anniversary with an expanded exhibition in the revamped Flight and the Arts Center that surveys how artists have captured space travel. Carolyn Russo, curator of the art collection, says "Flight originated from the imagination" and the show pairs artworks with the museum’s artifacts to show how people feel about flight. James Webb saw Bruce Stevenson’s 1961 portrait of Alan Shepard and pushed NASA to start an art programme; James Dean led that programme from 1962 to 1974 and later became the museum’s first art curator. Dean transferred about 2,000 NASA artworks to the museum; the collection has grown to more than 8,000 pieces, including works by Alexander Calder, Henry Casselli, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell and Alma Thomas. A selection of those works sits alongside staples of the museum such as the Wright brothers’ flyer, Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis, the Apollo 11 command module Columbia and Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit. The exhibition highlights contrasts in response to the space age: Norman Rockwell depicted the Apollo programme with researched realism in his Man’s First Step on the Moon, painted about three years before the 1969 moon landing, while Alma Thomas rendered the subject figuratively and exuberantly. Rockwell’s tone shifted after the Apollo 1 fire in 1967; in a 1969 draft speech he questioned whether the space programme should take priority over social problems at home.