Deniable Assets: Gender, labor, and the politics of authority in the NASA Art Program (1962–1974)

This paper examines an art collection created under the auspices of a government-sponsored art program run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from 1962 to 1974. The program enabled the agency to invite groups of artists to view the rocket launches at Cape Canaveral in Florida, and provided them with a small stipend in exchange for any resultant work. Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Norman Rockwell were specifically sought out for the program due to their significant contributions to American art, while others were contacted based on their reputations as wartime artists for the U.S. military during World War II. Such heroic male figures were integral to the mission of the NASA Art Program, and this paper investigates the relationship between NASA’s commissions and the postwar American landscape of Cold War politics and Space Age competition. This paper then introduces the work of Chrystal Jackson, one of the few female artists to participate in the NASA Art Program, in order to complicate this political narrative. Rather than depicting the rockets and astronauts favored by her peers, Jackson chose to pull her subject matter from the communities surrounding Cape Canaveral, encompassing local businesses, tourists, and NASA employees alike. This paper argues that her paintings thereby exert pressure on the body of work produced for NASA’s Art Program, presenting issues of gender, labor, and class as integral to the production of imagery during the American Space Age.