Featured Guests

Keynote Panel

Jennifer Roberts

Jennifer L. Roberts is an art historian whose scholarship focuses on the interface between the arts and the natural sciences, the history and theory of craft and materiality, and the history of print. After receiving her A.B. in English and Art History from Stanford (1992) and her Ph.D. in History of Art from Yale (2000), she joined the Harvard faculty in 2002. She held the Slade Professorship in Fine Arts at Cambridge University in 2019 and delivered the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in 2021.

Roberts is currently working on two projects that aim to challenge the binary divisions that are assumed to exist between the humanities and the sciences. She is outlining a new book and series of courses on the reciprocity of art and astrophysics. And, with artist Dario Robleto, she is co-writing a book about the EEG and EKG signatures that were engraved into NASA's Voyager Golden Record in 1977. These signatures are now 15 billion miles away, outside of the solar system. Titled The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System, the book explores the implications of this interstellar message within the longer history of recording graphic signals from the body. It will be published by Scribner in 2027.

In her scholarship and curating, Roberts has consistently emphasized the material intelligence of art and the challenge of storing and transmitting meaning through space and time. Her first book, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (2004), examines everything from crystallography to eschatology to show how Smithson built material models of time to confront the erasures of traditional history. Her book Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (2014), forges a material history of visual communication by tracing the literal transportation of pictures through the swamps, forests, oceans, and cities of the Anglo-American landscape between 1760 and 1860. In 2012 she curated the exhibition Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print for the Harvard Art Museums. That project sparked her interest in the generative power of the physical operations of printing – reversal, pressure, transfer, incision, etc. – and led to her book with Princeton University Press, based on her Mellon Lectures, titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print.

Roberts has long advocated for the value of making as a form of historical and interpretive research. She was the co-founder of Harvard's Minding Making Project, which explores artisanal knowledge as a bridge between the humanities and the fine, decorative, scientific, and industrial arts. She teaches a course with artist Matt Saunders that fully integrates the theory and history of printmaking with studio practice. Her own photography has taken on an increasingly formative role in her scholarly work.

Dario Robleto​

Dario Robleto was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1972. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1997. He lives and works in Houston, Texas.

Robleto’s work has been widely exhibited and is held in prominent collections, including the Menil Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Since 1997, he has had numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2024), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2024), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), Menil Collection (2014), the Baltimore Museum of Art (2014), the New Orleans Museum of Art (2012), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2011). In 2008, a ten-year survey exhibition, Alloy of Love, was organized by the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. In 2023, a second ten-year survey show, The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, was organized by the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. A major monograph accompanied each exhibition.

His work has been featured in numerous publications and media outlets, including Radiolab, Krista Tippett's On Being, and The New York Times. Robleto has held positions as an artist-in-residence, research fellow, and lecturer at various cultural and scientific institutions, including the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the SETI Institute, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Center for the Advancement and Study of Visual Arts at the National Gallery. During 2013-2014, he served as the Viola Frey Distinguished Visiting Professor at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. From 2016 to 2019, he was the Artist-in-Residence in Neuroaesthetics at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering, and from 2018 to 2023, he served as Artist-at-Large at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art. In 2015, he became a part of a distinguished team of scientists as the artistic consultant for Breakthrough Message—a multi-national initiative designed to stimulate intellectual and technical discussions about how and what to communicate if the ongoing search for intelligent life beyond Earth proves successful.

His awards include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, the USA Rasmuson Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant, and a VIA ART grant. In 2016, he was appointed as the Texas State 3-D Visual Artist, and in 2025, he was recognized as the Texas Artist of the Year by Art League, Houston. In 2025, Robleto received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Middlebury College.

Since 2019, he has been a member of the advisory board for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. In 2020, he worked as a research consultant for the popular science television series Cosmos: Possible Worlds, which aired on National Geographic and Fox. He is currently writing his first book, The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System: Science, Emotion, and the Golden Record, co-authored with Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts, and it is scheduled for publication by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster.

 

Outstanding Printmaker

Jenny Schmid

Jenny Schmid grew up in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she runs bikini press international and is a professor at the University of Minnesota Department of Art. She first learned intaglio printmaking at age 16 through a Smithsonian workshop and worked as an assistant in fine art lithography workshops in Seattle and San Francisco, starting at age 18. She has spent significant time in the Czech Republic, and Slovakia on a Fulbright Fellowship, learning traditional print processes. Schmid has collaborated with poets, musicians, programmers, librarians and a bioethicist to realize projects that range from print folios to large scale live animation projection commissions. Her work is influenced by and incorporates work from the print archives she frequents, and she looks across history to make sense of and respond to current social, political and environmental issues, most recently reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

She is a 2019 recipient of the McKnight Fellowship at Highpoint Center for Printmaking. Her 2020 linocut folio, “Pandemic/Pandemonium” featured by The Print Center in Philadelphia and Davidson Galleries, Seattle was purchased by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, University of Minnesota Library Special Collections and Seattle University.

Her animation "Microworlds” (music by Andy McCormick) exhibited in 2020, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin. Her print “Owlettes” was featured in the 2023 “Director’s Cut” by Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, UK and her work was shown in the three-person exhibition “Wandering Light” at Fukui City Gallery, Japan. She taught a 2023 intaglio intensive at Penland School for Crafts, NC, and enjoyed a July residency at In Cahoots in Petaluma, CA, creating monoprints in collaboration with poet Elisabeth Workman.

She is a 2024 recipient of a University of Minnesota Science Artist in Residence research award for “Disembodied/Reembodied: The Gaze and Dysphoria of Medical Images of Women’s Bodies'' in collaboration with the Wangensteen Historical Library, merging past and present images, resulting in a folio and exhibition in October 2024. The resulting folio has been purchased by the Library of Congress, The Minnesota Historical Society and the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, among others.