Welcome to a website on the work and life of artist Tom Van Sant (1939-2023), which is a companion to the exhibition An Earth Twin at the Digital Dawn: Tom Van Sant’s GeoSphere Project
As its title suggests, our exhibition focuses on The GeoSphere Project (c. 1989–2000), a groundbreaking work at the intersection of art, science, and digital technology that was designed to help save the planet for and from humanity. However, The GeoSphere was just one of the many works made by Tom Van Sant in his 60-plus years of professional artmaking.
In addition to being the “GeoSphere artist,” Van Sant was also an acclaimed architectural sculptor, “the grandfather of modern kite-making,” a painter whose activism helped pass federal legislation, an award-winning illustrator who documented real-life actions in Vietnam and on-set events in Hollywood, and a pioneering Space Artist who made “the world’s largest drawing” using sunlight, mirrors, and satellite technology. And much, much more.
While the architects, artists, kite-makers, and scientists who know about Tom’s work continue to value it, his activities were so diverse that they largely occurred in silos. The scientists, for example, don’t know about Van Sant’s kites and concrete sculptures, the kite-makers are unaware of the satellite imagery, and so on.
Researched and written by the exhibition curator Janet Owen Driggs, this website is an effort to ‘join the dots’ and provide a picture of Van Sant’s practice that shows not only its remarkable diversity but also its unifying factors. These are rooted in the things that Tom loved: innovating with materials and processes, public service, birds and anything related to the sky, looking down at the Earth, and – most of all – the natural world.