Pearl in the Night Sky: Reflections on the Moon in Art and Poetry

A lodestar for the lovestruck and a harbinger of our mortality, the moon has meant many things to many people across the millennia. In Roman mythology, the goddess Luna was associated with nocturnal magic. Long ago in Arabia, where desert trade routes were too hot to travel by day, navigation depended heavily upon the positions of the moon and stars. In the folklore of ancient China and Mexico, one sees not a man in the moon but rather a precious rabbit.

A protagonist in virtually every creation story, the moon is also a symbol of nation-building, and by the 1960s, became the focus of a global competition to see who could land a man on the lunar surface first. In 1962, John F. Kennedy proclaimed to the American people: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard … because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Even today, the promise of touching the moon’s surface represents universal honor and prestige. In August 2023, the citizens of India watched with rapt attention as theirs became the fourth nation to land on the moon. Japan launched its own lunar lander a few weeks later. By 2040, NASA believes Americans will have their first subdivision in space.

The moon also represents a voyage of discovery for which artists and writers have been perhaps our greatest ambassadors, and for which the moon has been our most faithful companion. Drawing from this spring of inspiration, the moon is here considered a muse, a mirror, and a metaphor for humankind’s enduring exploration of the world around us. Just as the moon reflects the light of our star, poets and artists reflect our most abiding ideals as a people. Artists like Eliot Porter depict the moon as a singular celestial body, while others like Anne Cooper and Frederico Vigil explore movement and the phases of the moon. Still others, like Patrick Nagatani, raise questions about the human relationships between humans, the land, and the universe. As Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

In 2023, physicist Samuel Peralta created a project to send a collection of art, poetry, film, and other creative works to the moon in commercial payload shipments, in tandem with NASA’s Artemis Mission. The latter mission was designed to establish the first long-term presence on the moon in order to prepare for the next giant leap: sending the first woman and the first person of color to the moon. Building on the spirit of the Voyager Mission of the 1970s, Peralta’s so-called “Lunar Codex” is only one among many efforts to send permanent archives of human expression into space.

This selection of works on paper addresses our collective and enduring fascination with the moon—our one and only satellite—and with bodies more distant still. Alongside these inspired works, you will encounter the words of writers both living and long-since passed whose meditations on the moon have likewise provided nourishment and catharsis—for themselves, and for each of us as well. A continuous, all-too-human reflection on what it means to be in the world, of this world, and to imagine worlds beyond this one.