Anna: Stargirl Art

Moon 27 is part of a 40 piece series that began with the premise of using all 120 water-color pencils in my Faber-Castell set, a roll of duct tape, and an obsession with John James Audubon’s bird drawings. I started with a circle shape from tracing the tape roll. The circles turned into colorful moons. All 40 Moon Plates are original watercolor paintings with pen drawings and typewriter text.

About the MOON Field Series
As a young woman in the ‘90’s in small town America, I enjoyed studying math and science in high school. I liked the design of it and that there was a degree of certainty. But I wasn’t automatically brilliant at it like my male classmates, so I wasn’t encouraged. I assumed I couldn’t learn it and that theres was no place for me. After all, there were no women teaching those topics in my school and no pictures of famous women mathematicians or scientists on the wall or in my textbooks.

Now, more women are being recognized for their contributions to math and science. Dorothy Johnson Vaughan, Maryam Mirzakhani, and so many more. And as I learn their stories, I feel this weight, this “what if.” How could my story have been different if I had known theirs? It wasn’t that ALL women were left out of these fields, but that they were left out of the history books. With that background in mind, these pieces attempt to reclaim math and science.

From there, a fictional character appeared to me. I imagined her as a scientist in the distant future with advanced technology, allowing her to see farther into space than we can now, documenting all these moons like Audubon documented his birds.
The little drawings and markings are her scientific notes as she discovers moon after moon. Because the moons can only be seen from certain locations, she travels to 40 countries to get different perspectives of the sky. Through her travels, she learns all the different ways to say moon. She learns that while every people, nation, and group have a different word for moon, we all, no matter where we live, what God we serve, what type of government we live under, we all still look up at the same moon every night with the same joy, longing, hope, loneliness, love, or loss.

“I note the obvious differences
between each sort and type,
but we are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.”

-Maya Angelou
“Human Family”