Humans have been fascinated with our nearest heavenly body, the Earth’s Moon, since prehistoric times. It has now been more than 50 years since we set foot on the Moon during the Apollo space missions, and we are now embarking on new journeys to the Moon with the Artemis missions. In this talk Alexandra will show how our obsession with the Moon has manifested itself in the visual arts and sciences, from earliest ritualistic drawings to scientific observation, Romantic symbolism, silent movies, and space race propaganda.

In 2018 Alexandra co-authored a book on the subject with astronomer Dr Robert Massey from the Royal Astronomical Society: Moon – Art, Science, Culture, which has been translated into Spanish and Chinese. In 2019 she edited an anthology on recent creative writing on the Moon: Pale Fire -New Writing on the Moon. Most recently, she contributed to chapters to a major new book on the Moon: Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps + Matter (Thames & Hudson and University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Dr Alexandra Loske FSA is a British-German art historian, writer, and Curator of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. She read English and Linguistics at Humboldt University, Berlin, and Art History at the University of Sussex, where she is a Research Associate working on women in colour history. In 2024 she gave the Mondrian Lecture on colour at the Sikkens Prize award ceremony in Rotterdam.

Alexandra has published and broadcast widely on colour, including Colour: A Visual History, and A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry. Among her recent works are the substantial Book of Colour Concepts (TASCHEN, 2024), the first monograph on pioneer Mary Gartside, Abstract Visions of Colour (2024), and The Royal Pavilion, Brighton: A Regency Palace of Colour and Sensation (Yale UP, 2025). Her latest book on colour is The Artist’s Palette (Thames & Hudson, 2024).