As part of the Tuesday Night Lecture Series (TNLS), Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts presents a lecture by art historian, Jennifer Roberts, organized by the MFA Print Media & Photography program.

Roberts’ lecture, “The Pastel from Mars,” revisits a remarkable moment in 1965, when NASA’s Mariner 4 probe captured the first images ever transmitted from another planet. While the numerical data slowly processed into television images, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory improvised: they pinned the data strips to a wall, purchased a box of pastels, and hand-colored the image—creating a color-by-number drawing that became humanity’s first glimpse of Mars. This unexpected use of an eighteenth-century medium to visualize cutting-edge space technology offers new ways to consider visual representation both on ...