Experts Eye: The Sky and Beyond with Avis Lang

Join experts for a series of dialogues on paintings from OLANA’s collection that are worth a closer look. During each gallery conversation, experts working in fields of science, art education, ecology, and indigenous history will share what they discover within a picture’s frame. This first talk will feature Avis Lang, former senior editor at Natural History magazine and coauthor with Neil deGrasse Tyson, for a conversation on what can be learned from examining Frederic Church’s sky paintings and expanding one’s vision upward.
Avis Lang is a former art history lecturer, essayist, and curator who produced the historic international exhibition "Pork Roasts: 250 Feminist Cartoons" (1981). She has spent decades recasting other people’s prose, most recently as a senior editor at "Natural History" magazine. She is the coauthor, with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, of "Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military" (2018). Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in various literary journals; a speculative tale by her and Tyson appeared in Orca (2021). A collection of her writings, "Recast Rethink Reboot: Essays & Tales," is forthcoming in 2025.