Big Blue Marble

In addition to producing the Whole Earth Catalog in the late 1960s, Stewart Brand campaigned to have NASA release a satellite image of the Earth in 1966. For him, the image “gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum.”

To celebrate Earth Day in 2016, I created an homage to that original depiction of our home as a 6-color screenprint. This simple design was presented as an open-ended provocation for viewers to consider its beauty from a macro scale. It depicts a view we cannot readily perceive while also exposing the process through which the print itself was made.

Now more than forty years later, seeing ourselves from this vantage point remains a profound idea.