Dr. Nia Imara’s ‘Painting The Cosmos’ Underscores the Connections in Everything

The book Painting The Cosmos challenges the notion that science and art exist in separate worlds; it also illustrates of how everything in this universe is actually connected. There is no separation, only slight differences. And from this diversity of cosmic forces, comes life itself.

The book is a science publication that reads like an uplifting conversation, packs in information like a textbook and feels like a coffee-table-worthy glossy periodical. But if you ask author Dr. Nia Imara, she’ll let you know: the book is art.

The 240-page read, published by BenBella Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster, is a window into Imara’s world, where the constant speed of light (186,000 miles per second) coexists with the fact that famed botanist George Washington Carver was also an avid painter (who made paint from peanuts).

Imara’s writing brings together stories of Chinese astronomers and Russian poets, with references to renowned painter Romare Bearden and legendary author Toni Morrison.

The book explores the rate at which the universe is expanding and delves into the study of the sun’s sound waves — helioseismology. Topics addressed include Einstein and Emory Douglas, and a reminder that we too are stardust, a perspective supported by a quote from the first African American woman to travel into space, Mae Jemison: “The really wonderful thing that happened to me when I was in space was this feeling of belonging to the entire universe.”

“That quote by Mae Jemison sums up a lot of the sentiment expressed in this book,” Imara says.

From Physics to astronomy to art

Raised in Oakland, Imara is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Department of Astronomy and a professor at UC Santa Cruz. In her book, another quote from Mae Jemison speaks directly to the author’s personal story: “Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Art provides a universal understanding of personal experience.”

Painting came to Imara later in life, but her love of science has been evident since her second year of high school. Inspired by an influential educator and her own “sophomoric” idea that studying science would bring about answers to her most crucial questions, she found her passion.

“Physics is the most fundamental of sciences,” says Imara, discussing her love of the subject and how it brings about a deep understanding of the natural world. But as she transcended academia her questions grew. To find answers she dabbled in the humanities and other subjects. But everything really changed when she was exposed to astronomy.

“It wasn’t so much from looking at the night sky and being awed by the stars,” she says, explaining her introduction to the science. “One of the things that drew me to astronomy was the beautiful pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope.” Astronomy, she says, is largely the science of images and colors.

Captivated by the art, she simultaneously became engulfed in the larger questions that astronomy explores. “You know, about whether life exists beyond our planet?” she says. “And so my path started to veer more and more towards astronomy, which is very closely related to physics.”

Painting people, finding community

A recreational artist since childhood, Imara got serious about painting “people-oriented” pieces while in grad school. “I think part of that might have even been a response from my life in academia,” she says, noting how isolating education can be.

“Even if it’s just me and the person I’m painting, I feel connected,” she explains. Art brought a sense of community she hadn’t experienced in academic science circles.

As her practice became more than a hobby, art and science remained disjointed. That is, until Imara was asked to teach a class that converged the two during a summer workshop at a college prep program in Oakland.

“The director saw my resume and they suggested that I do something on the connection,” she says, “like a physics and art workshop.”

That was the first time she made a curriculum connecting art and science — the foundation of Painting The Cosmos — but the spirit of the book had been brewing for a long time.

“This book was about three years in the making,” she says. “On the other hand, it was like 15 years in the making.” She attributes the contents to personal experience, the library of knowledge she’s gained through her studies and the people she’s talked to about a niche area of science known as “cultural astronomy.”

Difference creates harmony

Simply put, cultural astronomy is a way of understanding astronomy and scientific methods through the lens of non-Eurocentric cultures.

Imara goes a step further into the world of culture, and pulls from non-traditional sources to make profound points about science. She uses, for instance, the story of Clementine Hunter.

A self-taught African American artist who was born on a plantation in Louisiana in the 1880s, Hunter’s prolific depictions of Southern rural life — baptisms, farming and funerals — would go on to sell for thousands of dollars and be collected in museums around the nation.

“This woman is sharecropping most of her life,” says Imara of Hunter, “and she becomes an artist in her 50s.”

Imara relates to Hunter’s story on a deeper level, as both of her own grandmothers are from Louisiana. She also notices something in Hunter’s story that she’s seen while studying the cosmos: the role that faith plays in the creation process.

In writing about the creation of the cosmos, Imara points out that while there are things to be explored and scientists are still researching, what we do know is that a chain of events brought about a diversity of elements, and from those events our universe was birthed.

“The key is that there had to be a little bit of difference in order for some sort of harmony to be created,” Imara says. “The things that we see in nature, we can use those as metaphors to help us and to teach us how to be, how to live.”

‘Painting The Cosmos’ is available starting Feb. 25, 2025 in book stores and online, click here for more information.