Join Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture (FMCAC)’s resident organization, Arion Press, a fine art, handcrafted artist book publisher, for an “Artist Talk: Ala Ebtekar and Kim Stanley Robinson” on Wednesday, March 12, 2025, 6:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Arion hosts a genre-spanning conversation between artist Ala Ebtekar and celebrated science-fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson in the Bayfront Theater on the third floor of Landmark Building B.

A luminous conversation about the ties between science, literature, and the creative process, the talk draws inspiration from Ebtekar’s upcoming edition of Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall which he is creating as the second King Artist In Residence at Arion Press, developing cyanotype prints during the lunar eclipse on March 13 to 14, 2025. Their conversation explores the work of Asimov and the creative connections across science, nature, and both the literary and visual arts.

Following the talk, Arion Press and The Interval At Long Now co-host a reception in The Interval at Long Now in Building A, located directly across from Arion Press (Building B).

Ala Ebtekar (b. 1978, Berkeley, CA) has situated his practice as a leveling and collapsing of time and space. His work frequently orchestrates various orbits and cadences of time, bringing forth sculptural and photographic possibilities of the universe and time observing humanity. Exploring time, exposure, and light as both medium and metaphor, he uses sunlight, moonlight, and starlight to create durational works — sometimes taking an entire night to expose — which he views as collaborations with the sun, moon, and stars.

Ebtekar, throughout his practice, has employed the tactile traditions and properties of bookmaking, page and illumination in bound manuscripts, and classical training in Iranian coffeehouse painting. His alchemy of combining these legacies weaves into his commitment and work alongside enduring centuries of reclaimed text and image archives, poetry, and translation. His work has been widely exhibited across the globe at institutions such as the British Museum, Xinjiang Biennale, California Biennial, Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah, Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. His works are held in leading public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, British Museum, de Young Fine Arts Museum, Microsoft Art Collection, Devi Art Foundation in India, and Berkeley Art Museum, among others.

Kim Stanley Robinson (b. 1952, Waukegan, Illinois) is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the international bestselling Mars trilogy, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, Aurora, Shaman, Green Earth (the Science In The Capital trilogy), and 2312. He was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers’ Program in 1995 and returned in their Antarctic media program in 2016. In 2008 he was named a “Hero Of The Environment” by Time magazine. He works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and the University of California-San Diego’s Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. His work has been translated into 25 languages, and won a dozen awards in five countries, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 asteroid 72432 was named “Kimrobinson.”

The talk lasts 45 minutes followed by a 15-minute audience question-and-answer session.

A reception takes place after the talk in The Interval At Long Now in Building A.

SCHEDULE:

6:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.: Check-in
6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.: Artist Talk with Ala Ebtekar & Kim Stanley Robinson
7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.: Reception in The Interval At Long Now in Building A