A Memorial Site
James D. Dean
1931 – 2024
Artist · Administrator · Champion of Art in the Space Age
1962 – 1974
The NASA Fine Arts Program
“At the core, both art and aerospace exploration search for a meaning to life.”
— James Dean, Founding Director, NASA Fine Arts Program, 1962–1974
In 1962, I worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at its headquarters in Washington, DC. When a major launch or test flight took place, NASA cameras recorded everything. Yet when we looked at all these photographs something was missing. We were not experiencing the excitement or significance of these events. We came to the conclusion that artists must be asked to help complete this visual record. Machinery can duplicate and preserve the cold facts — but the emotional impact of what was going on is within the province of the artist.
With the close cooperation of the National Gallery of Art, I invited some of America’s best-known artists to observe and record NASA activities and become eyewitnesses to history in the making. Artists as varied as Robert Rauschenberg and Jamie Wyeth and Lamar Dodd and Norman Rockwell participated.
Among the Artists Who Participated
Robert Rauschenberg · Norman Rockwell · Jamie Wyeth · Lamar Dodd · Andy Warhol · Annie Leibovitz · Paul Calle · Robert McCall · Mitchell Jamieson · Peter Hurd · and many others
We covered the Mercury and Gemini programs of earth orbital flights and the Apollo moon landing program. It was a personally enriching experience — one which I will never forget. The resulting art was shown in two major exhibits at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and then toured throughout the United States and other countries for several years.
The art is now part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air & Space Museum. As a result of that program we now have a record for the future of historic events of the present in a permanent medium that is as old as recorded history itself — the eye and hand of the artist.
I directed this program from its inception in 1962 — well before there was a National Endowment for the Arts — until 1974, when I became Curator of Art at the National Air and Space Museum. In 1980 I left the Museum to devote time to my painting.
In His Own Words
The First Artists at the Cape
When the first group of artists arrived at Cape Canaveral for the Mercury program, the NASA people didn’t quite know what to make of them. They were used to photographers — a camera changes everything, people stiffen up or turn away. But artists with sketchbooks, sitting on the floor, were a different kind of presence. The security officers were uncertain what they were watching.
One artist with a sense of humor was sitting outside making sketches in a pad when a security officer walked over and demanded to know what he was doing and where he was from.
“I’m a spy from a poor country. We couldn’t afford a camera.”The guard said, “Come with me.” Dean got a call and had to go sort it out. No more jokes after that. But the exchange captures something real about what those early visits were — artists inserting themselves into a world of classified hardware, countdown clocks, and heavy security, armed with nothing but a pad and a pencil.
Norman Rockwell and the Space Suit
Getting Norman Rockwell involved required some maneuvering. He was no longer doing Saturday Evening Post covers — he was working for Look magazine on contemporary subjects, and he was genuinely interested in the space program. He came by Dean’s office after finishing a session at the White House photographing Lyndon Johnson for the 1964 election coverage. They talked about the Gemini program, and Rockwell said he wanted to paint two astronauts suiting up. The arrangement was worked out through Look magazine, bypassing the question of honorarium and public domain. Rockwell went to the Cape, saw the countdown demonstration, and went back to his studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts to begin work.
Then he called Dean with a problem. The space suits were too complex — too much detail to paint from memory or photographs. He needed a real suit in his studio.
Dean called Houston. The answer was no — classified material inside. He called again. Still no. He called a third time, this time invoking Look magazine, a fold-out spread, and a diagram identifying every piece of hardware on the suit. This time the answer was yes — but with a condition. They were sending someone with it.
A week later, a man named Joe Schmidt arrived in Massachusetts with a container holding one Gemini space suit. Schmidt had personally suited up every American astronaut. They sent the top man. Each morning he brought the suit to Rockwell’s studio, Rockwell painted, they had lunch together, and at the end of the day Schmidt took the suit back to his motel and slept with it.
“If you go to Joe Schmidt’s website now, where he’s given an oral history, he spends as much time talking about his time with Norman Rockwell as he does with any of the astronauts.”When the painting was finished, Rockwell shipped it to NASA and gave it outright. It went into the show at the National Gallery. The night the exhibition was being prepared, National Gallery Director John Walker came through the temporary gallery on his way home — coat on, briefcase in hand. He stopped in front of the Rockwell and stood there. Dean braced himself. The National Gallery and Norman Rockwell were not natural companions.
Walker said: “I never knew Norman Rockwell had such paint quality.”
Dean called Rockwell the next morning to tell him. Rockwell said:
“Oh, now I can die happy.”The man had spent his career being called an illustrator rather than a painter. In a temporary gallery at the National Gallery of Art, at eleven o’clock at night, it was finally settled.
Apollo 11: The Waitress and the Magazine
Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969. Dean had eight artists working at the Cape and three in Houston. After the launch, around noon, he went with Jamie Wyeth for lunch at the motel. Wyeth was in his early twenties. The waitress looked at him and asked for ID. He didn’t have it with him.
“But I’m 21. I just got married.”The waitress held firm. Then Dean remembered something. That week’s issue of Time magazine had run a photograph of Wyeth in its people column, covering his upcoming trip to Cape Kennedy for the Apollo 11 launch. Time always printed the subject’s name and age next to the photo.
Dean ran out to the motel front desk, found the magazine rack, got a copy of Time, brought it back, and showed it to the waitress. She brought Wyeth his drink.
“That was just one of the sidelights to a long day — but it worked out well.”The Art Train
Years after the program ended, for NASA’s 50th anniversary, Dean helped put together an exhibition that traveled on what was called the Art Train — three railroad cars converted into a narrow gallery, with work from the NASA collection on both sides, pulled by a locomotive to small towns across America. The locomotive would drop the cars for two weeks, then come back and haul them somewhere else. It was designed to bring original art to communities that were nowhere near a museum.
Dean went to Newton, Iowa with Paul Calle, one of the program’s original artists, to lecture. He watched people come through the cars and listened to what they said.
“I’ve never seen an original painting.”He asked them why they didn’t go to a museum. They said it was two hours away. They looked at magazines and had prints on the wall, but they had never stood in front of an original. Some of them had never been on an airplane.
“Here I’m looking at things about flying in space.”It was, Dean reflected, exactly what the program had always been for — opening doors that might not otherwise have been touched.
The above stories are drawn from a 2019 video interview with James Dean produced by WETA / PBS Arts.
During the early 1980s, I was invited by NASA to record my impressions of the Space Shuttle program during launch preparations at Cape Canaveral and a landing in the Mojave Desert. In the end, I got to see the NASA Art Program from the other side — giving me a delayed but well-rounded experience in what must be the longest-running art program in government.
Further Reading
- —A Different Perspective: Remembering James Dean, Founder of the NASA Art Program — NASA.gov tribute
- —NASA and Art — The program Dean founded, as documented by NASA History
- —NASA/ART: 50 Years of Exploration — Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2008 — Dean’s comprehensive history of the program
- —Eyewitness To Space — Co-authored by Dean — Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1972
- —WETA Arts video interview — Dean discusses the early days of the NASA Art Program, July 2019
