Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures
at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures (installation view) (2024). Image courtesy of the artists and Museum Associates/LACMA.

Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) collects visions of the universe. Across various artifacts and artworks—a Bronze-age celestial diagram, a Maya divination calendar, a twenty-first-century digital galaxy survey—the exhibition presents the drive to represent and understand the universe as universal. But, as the works on display reveal, if our investigation of the cosmos is a constant, so too is its mystery.

Though the objects and artworks depict a shared universe, each is tied to a specific people, landscape, or technology. Projections show Stonehenge (3100–1600 BCE) and the Nabta Playa stone circle (c. 6000–5500 BCE), ancient structures built to align with celestial movements. Other works, like Jessica Gullberg’s watercolor Inka Dark Constellations of the Milky Way (2009), emphasize the cultural contingency of cosmologies. The Inka located constellations in the spaces between stars, called yana phuyu, and Gullberg traces their shapes (rabbit, serpent) in chalk-white over a delicately painted Milky Way. Together, these works suggest that our place in time and space dictates not only what we see when we look at the night sky, but how we interpret it.

Today, scientists can render detailed, accurate images of the cosmos. Yet in this exhibition, the sky appears strikingly surreal and abstract. Edwin Hubble’s glass plate negative, for example, Discovery of a Cepheid Variable Star in the Andromeda Galaxy (1923), captured with what was then the world’s largest telescope, looks to nonexpert eyes like an inky efflorescence. Elsewhere, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s animation of galaxies shows particolored pixels undulating in curved grids. Cutting-edge tech produces some of the show’s most psychedelic imagery.

Other contemporary artworks seek renewed connections with the cosmos in a world where many see less of the night sky than ever. Liz Glynn’s Celestial Globe 39N94W (after Galileo) (2013) riffs on seventeenth-century globes, charting Glynn’s celestial positions on a given day. By transforming early modern technology into a diaristic map, the piece proposes a playful contemporary relationship with the stars. Meanwhile, Mercedes Dorame’s rendition of a Tongva star map, Portal for Tovaangar (2024), is spread on the ground and adorned with objects that reference Tongva artifacts of unknown purpose. Dyed resin crystals hang on invisible strings above the map’s center, and red yarn links its periphery to the ceiling. Here, and across the exhibit, a map of infinity is also a portal between the earth and the skies, the abstract and the tangible, the known universe and its ongoing mysteries.

Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures runs from October 20–March 2, 2025 at LACMA (5909 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036).