Ala Ebtekar’s Thirty-six Views of the Moon
Bibliography and Map
Featured in the SJMA exhibition A Point Stretched: Views on Time, Ala Ebtekar’s accumulative work Thirty-six Views of the Moon (2022) reflects the wide span of our technological and poetic observations of the moon. Ebtekar made this collection of cyanotypes under moonlight, using a photographic negative of the moon sourced from Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton in Santa Clara County. This negative was then fragmented and imposed on book pages from the artist’s personal library that span ten centuries of thinkers and poets reflecting on the night sky.
Explore the bibliography associated with the work below.
About the Artist
Born in 1978 in Berkeley, California, Ala Ebtekar currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. He is the founder and director of Stanford University’s Art, Social Space and Public Discourse, an ongoing Stanford global initiative on art that investigates the multiple contexts that shift and define changing ideas of public space. Ebtekar holds an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
His work has been exhibited widely at institutions including the ZKM–Museum for Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany; the 2014 Xinjiang Biennale, China; the California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California; Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; Asia Society, New York; Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas; The Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. Ebtekar’s works are in public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Germany; Devi Art Foundation, India; Orange County Museum of Art; de Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, Washington; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; among others. He has been awarded residencies at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles, Sazmanab in Tehran, Iran, and the San Francisco Center for the Book.
About the Exhibition
A Point Stretched: Views on Time highlights artworks in a variety of mediums that stretch, compact, and warp the viewer’s sense of time. The featured artists position our human existence within broader timescales—from long-ago ecologies to distant possible futures—to challenge our assumptions about human history, agency, and possibility in relation to the world, and universe, around us. Drawn primarily from SJMA’s permanent collection, the exhibition will be on view at SJMA through July 9, 2023.