A Passing I Missed, From March of This Year: Jim Dean, Created NASA's Art -- And Artists' -- Program...

But first, a confession -- many I night I lay awake staring at posters tacked to the ceiling in our mountain town (not the kinds some might imagine!), as these were re-gifted -- from the nuns, after the same had run their course, as teaching aids, in the elementary school (and likely furnished to schools nationwide, nearly for free, by NASA).

I am certain some of those renderings -- of water-color laden moons around Jupiter, and Mars. . . and even the tiny but history-making Sputnik-1. . . were Jim's creations, or collaborations.

So it is that we celebrate both his career at NASA, and at the Smithsonian, in inspiring generations of STEM kids to go into. . . the space sciences -- a field that didn't really exist much before 1962. Well-lived, Jim -- well lived:

. . .Dean also recognized the importance of having a diverse range of artists present, even if they were all ostensibly there to capture the same historical event. “When you have six artists sitting together painting the same thing,” he explained, “each painting is different. And that’s because … they’re seeing all the same thing, but the image goes through their imagination too and all their experience. . . .”

Dean served as the director of the NASA Art Program from 1962 to 1974, before leaving to become the first art curator for the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum from 1974 until his retirement in 1980. He passed away in Washington on March 22, 2024, at the age of 92. But his legacy lives on in the NASA Art Program collection, which currently has some 3,000 works divided between the National Air and Space Museum and NASA. Today, the program is focused on STEM outreach initiatives to inspire youth through creative activity. . . .

Grinning ear to ear. Onward.

नमस्ते