Turn the corner in the exhibition Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy, and you are confronted by a haunting specter: what appears to be a skeleton floating in midair—head thrown back in stunned immobility, limbs limp—illuminated in radiant neon.
Suspended in darkness, it is almost impossible to distinguish the floor from the walls but for this pulsing anatomical effigy.
Upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that it is a delicate constellation of circulatory system, bones, and organs, flickering with colorful light. It is a portrait of Major Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American to be selected as an astronaut. The glass sculpture, titled Robert, was made by former Getty artist-in-residence Tavares Strachan to honor this important figure, whose story is seldom featured in the annals of history.
Who Was Robert?
Born in 1935 in Chicago, Lawrence grew up to be a highly accomplished pilot in the Air Force, while also earning a PhD in physical chemistry. In 1967 he was assigned to the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), a national security space mission aimed at spying on America's Cold War adversaries, and a predecessor to NASA's space shuttle program aimed at obtaining high-resolution photographic imagery. The only MOL astronaut with a doctorate at this time, he also conducted research on top secret matters and helped develop the so-called flare maneuver for steep-descent landings.
His inclusion in this outfit was undoubtedly trailblazing, yet when asked about whether his appointment played a role in improving race relations, he humbly replied: “No, I don’t think so. It’s another one of those things that we look forward to in civil rights—normal progression,” and thanked those that came before him.
Tragically, Lawrence never made it to space; he was killed in a training incident in 1967 at Edwards Air Force Base in California at the age of 32. Lawrence’s widow received racist letters and phone calls after his death, with many questioning whether he really was Black. It would be 11 years before another African American man would be chosen to become an astronaut.
Restoring a Legacy
Despite his pioneering accomplishments, and the weighty significance of being the first Black man to achieve such status, Lawrence’s contributions to space exploration were rarely acknowledged and essentially erased from the historical narrative. The Air Force didn’t officially recognize Lawrence as an astronaut until 1997. Laboring to restore and honor his memory, Strachan has produced several artworks dedicated to Lawrence, including a piece that would literally send him into space. In a 2018 collaboration with LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab and SpaceX, the artist launched ENOCH, a gilded canopic jar decorated with Lawrence’s features, into orbit via satellite.
Unlike ENOCH, which depicts Lawrence’s helmeted face, Robert is not a true likeness, but rather a conceptual portrait. A fragile system of bones, veins, and arteries, his iridescent form is immortalized, floating weightless in space, a literal luminary beaming from within. His glass heart beats steadily, throbbing with life even after an untimely death.
Illuminating the Invisible
An earlier neon anatomical sculpture by Strachan, What Will Be Remembered in the Face of All That Is Forgotten, commemorates Rosalind Franklin, a British chemist whose research was critical to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, yet who was excluded from the Nobel Prize. A glowing circulatory system with arms outstretched, this transcendent portrait seeks to expose and rectify this extraordinary woman’s omission from history and denial of appropriate accolades. Strachan’s anatomical homage is part of the belated recognition of Franklin’s contributions to science, illuminating at last the “dark lady of DNA”.
These tributes to the overlooked are part of Strachan’s multimedia project examining the nature of invisibility—the ways that marginalized people are left out of the historical narrative or public consciousness. Applying the visual vocabularies of science, from anatomical illustrations to diagrams and mathematical proofs, Strachan interrogates systems of cultural erasure and absence, giving form to the unseen and unrecognized.
This conceptual practice confronts the institutions of power that gatekeep knowledge and truth, questioning who assigns value and determines what is worthy of record. As Strachan has noted, scientific knowledge is far from neutral or objective. Rather, it has been mobilized in support of racist ideologies and discriminatory policies, offering purported legitimacy to eugenics, slavery, colonialism, and the oppression of women. Structural racism and sexism are deeply embedded in the history of anatomical study and visualization, in which the universal body is generally presented as a white, able-bodied male. Just as Lawrence has been left out of the history of space exploration, so too are non-white bodies virtually absent from the canon of European anatomical illustration.
Strachan’s ongoing efforts to transcend invisibility echo the fundamental task of anatomical illustration—to make the obscured internal body visible to observation. And while his anatomical portraits do not serve a scientific inquiry, they insist upon a collective universal humanity and assert value for all human life.
