November, 2023
Film Screening and Conversation: Artist Dario Robleto with Jennifer Roberts
Join us for a screening of artist Dario Robleto’s film The Aorta of an Archivist, followed by a conversation between Robleto and art historian Jennifer Roberts, in conjunction with the exhibition Seeing in Art and Medicine, on view from September 2 to December 30, 2023.
September, 2023
Group exhibition, Seeing in Art and Medicine, opens at the Harvard Art Museum
This exhibition and the medical humanities program on which it is based are part of the Harvard
Art Museums’ broader commitment to interdisciplinary learning. Now in its sixth year, the Seeing in Art and Medical Imaging program welcomes a cohort of nuclear medicine and radiology residents from Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital to explore questions about human relationships, emotions, beliefs, and opinions through art.
June 27, 2023
Interview: An exchange with Dario Robleto
July 8, 2023
Artist Talk Back: The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto
Gallery talk led by artist Dario Robleto and Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts and exhibition curator.
Explore questions and ideas raised inThe Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto during gallery talks presented from perspectives across disciplines—from The Block, Northwestern University, and beyond.
May 24, 2023
The Future Heart in Poetry and Medicine: Dario Robleto, Doris Taylor, Adrian Matejka
Who can claim knowledge of the human heart? Can poetry, art, and medicine each contribute to our understanding of this historically and biologically complex organ? Inspired by astonishing advances in biomedical engineering, this cross-disciplinary conversation contemplates the possibility of a “future heart” distinct from anything we’ve known before.
May 23, 2023
Dario Robleto interviewed on podcast Strange Customs with Sasha Sagan
The season 1 finale of Strange Customs brings Sasha Sagan to an extraordinary Chicago exhibition for a conversation with artist Dario Robleto. Situated at the intersection of art and science, the show also has its inspiration and roots in Sasha’s own family. We’ll also hear from Harvard art historian Dr. Jennifer Roberts about the ways art and science share a mission to extend our vision beyond the horizon.
May 18, 2023
The Artist and the Book | Dario Robleto in Conversation with Mimi Swartz
In this conversation, artist Dario Robleto and writer Mimi Swartz discuss how books, research, and libraries are protagonists in the art world today. The talk explores what books and research mean for contemporary practitioners.
May 17-28, 2023
Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management
The exhibition, which includes a series of performances and film screenings, challenges the dominant modern conception of time as objective, divisible, and linear. The artworks explore how time is represented, lived, and contested in the catastrophic present.
April 10 - Sept 10, 2023
Group exhibition, Together, opens at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA) announces Together, a celebratory inaugural exhibition offering kaleidoscopic arrangements of family, friends, community, and our connection to the natural world. Curated by AMFA, and featuring loans and several new acquisitions, Together will be on view in one of the Harriet and Warren Stephens Galleries from the museum’s grand opening on April 22, 2023, through September 10, 2023.
April 14, 2023
The Common Ground Between Art and Science
By Brian Sandalow
Professor Malcolm MacIver and artist Dario Robleto spoke during an April 12 event
April 12, 2023
At the Limits of Life and Empathy: Dario Robleto and Malcolm MacIver
Northwestern Professor of Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering Malcolm MacIver researches the relationship between sense perception, cognition, and evolution. This dialogue between the scientist and Dario Robleto will explore how art and science both contemplate—and seek to overcome—the physical and temporal limits of human life. The discussion will touch on the question of how art might provide a model for long-term thinking, especially in times of societal and ecological transformation.
March 10 - May 27, 2023
Group exhibition: Rituals of Devotion opens at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
Rituals of Devotion features sculpture, painting, and photography organized to celebrate the rich narratives that surround ritual practice in its many forms. A journey through the sacred, otherworldly, and mundane, the exhibition explores the performance of ritual as a tool for transformation and empathy.
Featured artists include: Marina Abramovic, Tacita Dean, William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edvard Munch, Dario Robleto, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Mark Todd,Suzanne Treister, Esther Pearl Watson
March 27, 2023
The closest thing to eternal that we have ever touched: Ann Druyan on interstellar ethics, subversive art, and rising to the questions of the cosmos
In conjunction with The Heart’s Knowledge, The Block hosted a special online conversation with Druyan, Robleto and Jennifer Roberts, Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. Roberts and Robleto are co-authoring a book about the interstellar journey of the pulse wave recordings that Druyan included on the Voyager Golden Record. The conversation ranged from the history of Druyan’s work on the Golden Record with her husband and collaborator Carl Sagan, to ideas of gift-giving, to questions of love, ethics, and truth that are raised when considering a message with a billion-year-timeline.
March 08, 2023
Exhibition Conversation [Online]: Ann Druyan, The Golden Record, and the Memory of Our Hearts
What do we owe to the memory of each other’s hearts? From her work in the 1970s as the Creative Director for NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project to her current role as writer and producer of the beloved television series Cosmos, Ann Druyan has devoted her life to expanding the horizons of human empathy and communication. In insisting that the thresholds of cosmic exploration must be approached with sincerity, humility, and generosity, she has had a deep influence on Dario Robleto’s work throughout his career. Druyan and Robleto will be joined in conversation with The Heart’s Knowledge catalogue contributor Jennifer Roberts, Professor of the Humanities at Harvard.
February 22, 2023
Exhibition Conversation: Interstellar Aesthetics and Acts of Translation in Art and Science
In this dialogue on “interstellar aesthetics,” artist Dario Robleto will join Elizabeth Kessler, exhibition catalogue contributor and Lecturer in American Studies, Stanford University, and Shane Larson, Northwestern Research Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Associate Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), to consider how astronomers and artists translate data into images, and how these translations shape the meaning of the cosmos in the public imagination.
February 16 - July 09, 2023
Group exhibition: Spirit in the Land opens at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Spirit in the Land is a contemporary art exhibition that examines today’s urgent ecological concerns from a cultural perspective, demonstrating how intricately our identities and natural environments are intertwined. Through their artwork, thirty artists show us how rooted in the earth our most cherished cultural traditions are, how our relationship to land and water shapes us as individuals and communities.
Featured Artists Include: Terry Adkins, Rina Banerjee, Annalee Davis, Tamika Galanis, Allison Janae Hamilton, Barkley L. Hendricks, Alexa Kleinbard, Meryl McMaster, Wangechi Mutu, Dario Robleto, Jim Roche, Kathleen Ryan, Sheldon Scott, Renée Stout, Monique Verdin, Stacy Lynn Waddell, Charmaine Watkiss, Marie Watt, Carrie Mae Weems.
February, 2023
Career survey publication: The Heart's Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto
Published by The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University and distributed by
ARTBOOK-DAP, the book reflects a decade of profound creative exploration and proposes new models for understanding research-based creative practice in visual culture studies. Edited by Michael Metzger with contributions by Robert M. Brain, Daniel K. L. Chua, Patrick Feaster, Stefan Helmreich, Elizabeth A. Kessler, Julius B. Lucks, Michael Metzger, Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, Alexander Rehding, Jennifer L. Roberts, Dario Robleto, and Claire Isabel Webb.
February 11, 2023
A space-age love story inspires science-meets-art exhibition
The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, a new art exhibition at Northwestern University, was inspired by — and is dedicated to — Druyan.
February 10, 2023
Artist Talk: LaToya Hobbs, Dario Robleto,
And Alison Elizabeth Taylor
The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA) announces its grand opening season of engaging programs and events. The inaugural Artist Talk on the museum’s exhibition Together, will have nationally celebrated artists LaToya Hobbs, Dario Robleto, and Alison Elizabeth Taylor as speakers. With programming spanning theatre, dance, film, musical performances and youth-centered events, guests can expect offerings for everyone.
February 08, 2023
Open your eyes to Science on Screen
Dario Robleto’s exhibit at the Block Museum and the associated film series explore the beauty and the price of humanity’s quest for knowledge.
February 07, 2023
Finding Emotion and Empathy in Science
Through art, Dario Robleto attempts to expand human empathy and the understanding of other’s emotions and experiences. In The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, he asks the provocative question as to whether empathy extends beyond the boundaries of time and space.
Dario Robleto discussed his new exhibition during a February 4 opening
February 4, 2023
Science, Art, and the Search for Meaning: Opening Conversation with Dario Robleto
In this opening conversation to celebrate Dario Robleto’s 10-year survey exhibition, The Heart’s Knowledge, the artist will be joined by Jennifer Roberts, Harvard Professor of the Humanities,
Lucianne Walkowicz, astronomer and co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance, and Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts and curator of the exhibition. The conversation will reflect on questions that reach across boundaries and examine the shared pursuit that binds artists and scientists.
February 2, 2023
Stillness of a Pounding Heart: A Review of The Heart’s Knowledgeat Northwestern’s Block Museum
By Jennifer Smart.
Over the course of his career, the Texas-based visual artist Dario Robleto has been exploring how art can transmit a palpable sense of history and emotion. He attends closely to the cultural and material histories of objects (he has worked with everything from vinyl records to buttons to butterfly wings), transforming found materials into intricately crafted, often intimate sculptural objects. The focus of The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, the exhibition on view at Northwestern’s Block Museum, is the last decade of his career.
February 1, 2023
In new exhibition, Dario Robleto explores history of the human heart and cosmic boundaries of perception
For American artist Dario Robleto (b. 1972), artists and scientists share a common aspiration: to increase the sensitivity of their observations. This idea has guided Robleto throughout his five-year engagement as Artist-at Large between The Block Museum of Art and the McCormick School of Engineering. This unique position offered the artist an open “hall pass” to learn from, collaborate with, and even question scientists, engineers, and experts from across Northwestern. The enterprise has led to surprising connections, as Robleto’s expanding conversations around ethics and empathy in scientific fields have come to impact faculty and student understandings of their work.
In culmination of this longtime collaboration, The Block Museum of Art and McCormick School of Engineering jointly present The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto (January 26 – July 9, 2023)
