Join artist Lia Halloran for a talk on Dark Skate, her long-exposure night photographs in which she skates through the empty pools, drainage ditches, and concrete spaces of Los Angeles carrying a light, leaving behind a single luminous line. Begun in the early 2000s, the series treats the body in motion as a drawing tool and the city as a page, capturing an experience that is at once physical, fleeting, and invisible to the naked eye. Halloran will discuss how skateboarding first taught her to reimagine urban terrain through motion and time, and how those same questions of perception and scale carry through her broader practice in painting, photography, video, and cyanotype, from archival work on the overlooked women of astronomy to collaborations with astrophysicists. Across subjects as varied as flight, crystals, and the night sky, Dark Skate remains a foundation for how she visualizes what cannot be seen directly.
Lia Halloran is an artist and educator whose work illuminates the overlooked contributions of women and queer people to astronomy, aviation, and the sciences. Working across painting, photography, video, and cyanotype, she draws on archival research and embodied experience to explore time, space, and identity, moving fluidly between the scale of the body and the vastness of the cosmos. With Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, she co-authored The Warped Side of Our Universe (Liveright/Norton, 2023). Halloran’s work is held in major collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, Simons Foundation, New York, NY, Harvard University, and the Norton Museum of Art, Caltech, Pasadena, CA and has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Art in America, The Boston Globe, and ARTnews, among many others.
Halloran holds a B.A. in Art from UCLA and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. She lives and works in Los Angeles, is represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, and is Professor of Art at Chapman University, where she teaches painting and interdisciplinary courses that explore the intersection of art and science.