Gamwell sees echoes of Mitchell’s dark stars, for instance, in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “A Descent Into the Maelstrom,” particularly the evocative 1919 illustration by Harry Clarke. “This seemed to have been an early analogy to a black hole for many people when the concept was first proposed,” said Gamwell. “It’s a mathematical construct at that point and it’s very difficult to imagine a mathematical construct. Poe actually envisioned a dark star [elsewhere in his writings].”

The featured art spans nearly every medium: charcoal sketches, pen-and-ink drawings, oil or acrylic paintings, murals, sculptures, traditional and digital photography, and immersive room-sized multimedia installations, such as a 2021-2022 piece called Gravitational Arena by Chinese artist Xu Bing. “Xu Bing does most of his work about language,” said Gamwell. For Gravitational Arena, “He takes a quote about language from Wittgenstein and translates it into his own script, the English alphabet written to resemble Chinese characters. Then he applies gravity to it and makes a singularity. [The installation] is several stories high and he covered the gallery floor with a mirror. So you walk upstairs and you see it’s like a wormhole, which he turns into an analogy for translation.”

“Anything in the vicinity of a black hole is violently torn apart owing to its extreme gravity—the strongest in the universe,” Gamwell writes about the enduring appeal of black holes as artistic inspiration. “We see this violence in the works of artists like Cai Guo-­ Qiang and Takashi Murakami, who have used black holes to symbolize the brutality unleashed by the atomic bomb. The inescapable pull of a black hole is also a ready metaphor for depression in the work of artists such as Moonassi. Thus, on the one hand, the black hole provides artists with a symbol to express the devastations and anxieties of the modern world. On the other hand, however, a black hole’s extreme gravity is the source of stupendous energy, and artists such as Yambe Tam invite viewers to embrace darkness as a path to transformation, awe, and wonder.”