4 / AMAM.OBERLIN.EDU ON VIEW / ELLEN JOHNSON GALLERY / AUG 1–DEC 23 ANNA VON MERTENS HENRIETTA LEAVITT: A LIFE SPENT LOOKING The insights and efforts of two extraordinary women, separated by more than a century—Henrietta Leavitt and Anna Von Mertens—have combined to form this exhibition. Each has spent a lifetime engaged in close looking, and, more than that, in ensuring that the discoveries that resulted from this intimate, intentional act had positive impacts felt far beyond their own surroundings. Henrietta Leavitt, born in 1868 in Lancaster, Massachusetts, was an astronomer whose discovery of the connection between a variable star’s period of pulsation and its intrinsic luminosity enabled the calculation of large-scale astronomical distance; this allowed for the understanding that galaxies exist beyond our own, and that the universe is expanding. Anna Von Mertens, born in 1973 and living in NewHampshire, is a visual artist whose work at the intersection of art, history, and science encourages us to see important events and phenomena in a new light. In April 1885 Leavitt’s father, a Congregationalist pastor, moved his family fromCambridge, Massachusetts, to Cleveland, Ohio, and in that year Henrietta took up studies at Oberlin College, first in a preparatory course and then in two years of undergraduate classes, includingmemorabilia, trigonometry, literature, mechanics, Greek, French, chemistry, and rhetoric, as well as music at the Conservatory. This preparation stood her in good stead when in 1888 she applied to and entered what became known (in 1894) as Radcliffe College. Here she continued to study languages (Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, and English), as well as philosophy, natural history, andmath. In her final year she took astronomy at the Harvard College Observatory where, following her 1892 graduation, she pursued graduate classes, in addition to volunteering. Her time in Cambridge was interrupted by travel in Europe from 1896–98, and
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