
Lia Halloran was born 1977 in Chicago, IL. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Halloran received a BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1999 and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2001. For the past fifteen years, Lia Halloran’s studio practice has been in dialogue with science and nature, and discusses topics such as astrophysics, magnetism and gravity, perception and scale, giant crystal and ice caves, cabinets of curiosity, taxonomy and classification, the periodic table of elements, and interconnected relativity. Halloran grew up surfing and skateboarding in the Bay Area and developed a deep love of science while working at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, her first high school job.
Halloran has participated in several interdisciplinary projects and collaborations including curating exhibitions, creating platforms for critical dialogue on contemporary art, and establishing connections between science and art—most notably coauthoring a forthcoming book with the award-winning theoretical physicist Kip Thorne about the warped side of the universe. Her series Deep Sky Companion, which reinterprets the 18th century French comet hunter Charles Messier’s “Catalogue of Deep Sky Objects” in 110 paintings and their 110 photographic twins, is on permanent display at the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA.
The gallery is very honored to announce that Lia Halloran has been named a 2020-2021 City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Individual Artist Fellow. As a C.O.L.A. Fellow, Halloran will be awarded a $10,000 grant to produce a new body of work which will be premiered by the City of Los Angeles in Spring 2021.
The 2020/21 C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellows in literary, performing, and visual arts are: Neel Agrawal, Noel Alumit, Edgar Arceneaux, Maura Brewer, Nao Bustamante, Jedediah, Caesar, Neha Choksi, Michael Datcher, Sarah Elgart, Lia Halloran, Phung Huynh, Farrah Karapetian, Ruben Ochoa, and Umar Rashid.
Lia Halloran and Kip Thorne will debut a section of their book, to be published by Norton this upcoming year, as part of The Universe in Verse. Ordinarily a ticketed charitable event, with all proceeds benefiting a chosen ecological or scientific-humanistic nonprofit each year, the 2020 edition will be livestreamed on April 25, 2020 at 1:30pm PST.
An immersive examination of how humans have conceptualized the sky throughout history, SKY will demonstrate how the unfolding realities exposed by new science are affecting change in the understanding of ourselves, our planet and beyond.
On Tuesday, February 11, 2020 from 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm in the 5th floor Lounge of the Simon's Foundation Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, a new commission by Lia Halloran will be unveiled. Solar (2019) is a mural-sized cyanotype measuring 120 x 131 inches and inspired by the artist's ongoing series Your Body Is A Space That Sees.
Double Horizon features works by Lia Halloran that investigate the personal, physical, psychological, and scientific exploration of space.
Drawing primarily from SBMA’s permanent collection and supplemented by loans from area collections, The Observable Universe explores a diverse range of artistic representations of the cosmos roughly coinciding with the ‘Space Age’ of the last sixty years.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Chris Engman's photograph Prospect (2016) from his ongoing Prospect and Refuge series and Lia Halloran's drawing Andromeda, after Mollie O' Reilly (2017) from her ongoing series Your Body Is A Space That Sees were acquired by the Microsoft Art Collection in Redmond, WA. The Microsoft Art Collection was launched in 1987 by a committee made up of employees interested in collecting and displaying artwork created by artists from the community. Over the past quarter-century, the Collection has mirrored the corporation’s meteoric growth with nearly 5,000 artworks on display in over 130 buildings throughout North America.
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce that Lia Halloran's Triangulum, After Adelaide Ames (2017), Paper Dolls (2016), and Ken Gonzales-Day's 41 Objects Arranged by Color (2016) were acquired by the Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University in Orange, CA. Both of Halloran's works are part of Your Body is a Space That Sees an ongoing series of cameraless cyanotypes that highlight the achievements of the Harvard Observatory female researchers who made significant contributions to the field of astronomy. Gonzales-Day's photograph is part of his ongoing Profiled series in which the artist photographs sculptures of the human form as found in international museum and anthropology collections as a way to reveal the emergence, idealization, and even folly of race. Beyond its role in curating art in public spaces, the Escalette Collection is a learning laboratory that offers diverse opportunities for student and engagement and research, and involvement with the wider community.
This spring, Los Angeles-based artist Lia Halloran was to have joined Caltech as artist-in-residence in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences as part of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. COVID-19 upended those plans, and Halloran’s residency has been postponed until the spring of 2021.
The past few months have been busy for Halloran, however, as she has put the finishing touches on a book project she has been working on for more than a decade with Kip Thorne (BS ’62), Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, and one of the recipients of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. The book, The Warped Side of Our Universe, is to be published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2021 and features poetic verse by Thorne alongside paintings by Halloran.
Since 2017, The Universe in Verse has been celebrating the natural world — the science, the splendor, the mystery of it — through poetry, that lovely backdoor to consciousness, bypassing our habitual barricades of thought and feeling to reveal reality afresh. And now here we are — “survivors of immeasurable events,” in the words of the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson, “small, wet miracles without instruction, only the imperative of change” — suddenly scattered six feet apart across a changed world, blinking with disorientation, disbelief, and no small measure of heartache.
Perspective is constantly shifting, from Lia Halloran’s cyanotype of The Great Comet, 2019, trailing clouds of glory, to the spider who does an unscripted walk-on in Christopher Richmond’s looped video of a rotating asteroid, Viewing Stone, 2018. The spider remminds the viewer how ultimately small we, and spiders, are in the cosmic view of things.
A personal telescope belonging to astronomer George Ellery Hale, developed in 1885 that afforded a precise view of the night sky representing a leap in astronomical technology, is adjacent to Lia Halloran’s The Great Comet, 2019, a monumental cyanotype suggesting the marvels of astronomical phenomena that might have been experienced by pre-technological peoples
Artist Lia Halloran has skateboarded through runoff drains in pitch darkness, piloted a plane solo over Los Angeles and navigated dense theories of interstellar wormholes.Her diverse studio practices simply follow her personal curiosities, which she said often land her in interdisciplinary spaces where she can warp and manipulate concepts of space and time.The alumna most recently experimented with spatial distortion through an audio-visual installation called “Lia Halloran: Double Horizon,” on display at the ArtCenter College of Design’s Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery until March 15.
Lia Halloran, Double Horizon, at Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery. To create large-scale filmic views of Los Angeles, Halloran takes to the air, mounting four cameras to an airplane that she piloted during more than 30 flights. She has put the footage together into an immersive, three-screen projection that is accompanied by a score created by Allyson Newman. Runs through March 15. ArtCenter South Campus, 1111 S. Arroyo Pkwy., Pasadena
A painter, photographer, and science enthusiast, Lia Halloran fuses together artistic creativity with a splash of scientific elements into her works. As an investigative explorer of space in its physical, psychological, and scientific forms, Lia uses these concepts as a major point to begin her creations; art allows her to express various concepts in science and gives her an outlet to explore many different themes that relate to humans, such as our place in the world, both psychologically and emotionally.
Double Horizon reflects the artist’s ongoing investigations of the body’s relationship to space in three simultaneous, large-scale, aerial views of the greater Los Angeles landscape. Double Horizon is Lia Halloran’s most recent work in her ongoing investigations into the physical, psychological and scientific explorations of space.
Los Angeles artist Lia Halloran wants to touch the heavens and to celebrate women who had the same ambition long before her. Her The Same Sky Overarches Us All, at the University of Maryland Art Gallery, mostly consists of seven-foot-high vertical prints inspired by a group of women known as the Harvard Computers. Halloran weaves their story, along with her own and the universe’s, into cosmic vignettes.
With sweeps of blue and white, painter and photographer Lia Halloran explores the often overlooked accomplishments and progression of women astronomers through her exhibition The Same Sky Overarches Us All. Curated by Taras Matla, acting director of the University of Maryland’s Art Gallery, the exhibit is beautiful — and it has an admirable purpose. “Everyone’s promoting gender equality… this is a good place to portray female accomplishments,” said Victoria Hernandez, a senior art and communication major who works in the art gallery.
Your Body is a Space That Sees is a series of large-scale cyanotype works (approximately 6ft x 6ft) that source the fragmented history and contributions of women in astronomy to represent a female-centric astronomical catalog of craters, comets, galaxies and nebula drawing from narrative, imagery and historical accounts of a group of women known as ‘Pickering’s Harem’ or the ‘Harvard Computers’. This little-known group of up to forty women made significant influences in the field of astronomy by setting up classification systems that are still used today to measure the distance,at and chemical content of stars and yet were paid less than half the wages of men.
Double Horizon takes its title from Lia Halloran’s three-channel video installation composed from documentation of roughly thirty flights the artist made in the course of her training in air piloting and navigation and early aviation experiences over the greater Los Angeles area. In its play of continuous moving and transformed moving images, the work represents a significant departure from work that precedes and continues alongside it.
How far will an artist go to create their work? ORLAN altered her physical appearance, transforming herself using elements from famous paintings and sculptures via plastic surgery. Marina Abramovic invited Museum of Modern Art visitors to sit still and silently across from her for unspecified durations of time over 10 weeks in 2010. Lia Halloran, an artist who grew up surfing and skateboarding in the San Francisco Bay Area, learned to fly airplanes in order to film the landscape of Los Angeles from the sky.
Three large wooden tables that feature in-process paintings, resource books and a host of media are installed in the middle of the Lux Art Institute’s main gallery. The impromptu workshop has started to resemble the studio of artist Lia Halloran as she begins her residency at the museum. Halloran will continue to make work in the space for the next few weeks, while the current exhibit frames her interest in invisible histories and reimagined possibilities in astronomy.
“THE GREATEST SCIENTISTS are artists as well,” said Albert Einstein. For as long as artistic expression has existed, it has benefited from interplay with scientific principles – be it experimentation with new materials or the discovery of techniques to render different perspectives. Likewise, art has long contributed to the work and communication of science. We asked four outstanding artists to comment on their work and its relationship to science.
A special in-studio episode of The Limit Does Not Exist! podcast. Lia Halloran is the type of artist who knows no bounds, exploring everything from the depths of our solar system to her local skate park. In this episode, Halloran shares her keys to successful collaborations and why she seeks out learning new skills. Plus, she offers advice on funding your ideas and why personal embarrassment can be a really good thing.
Visual artist Lia Halloran's newest exhibit, Your Body is a Space That Sees, features large-scale paintings of astronomical objects that were photographed and catalogued by women working at the Harvard Observatory in the late 1800s. Those women, along with their male colleagues, took thousands of photographs, catalogued and characterized the cosmic objects therein, and changed the landscape of space science. Despite the impact their work had on the world, those women were left out of history for many decades, a fate suffered by many female scientists that is now being somewhat remedied.
Last week, Pioneer Works held a lecture discussing Dava Sobel's new book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, as part of a series of events bridging the arts and sciences. In a collaborative conversation with artist Lia Halloran and the center's director of science Janna Levin, Sobel took to introduce the audience to the untold story of Harvard’s first female computers.