At the Menil, Jitish Kallat Reflects on the Day the Moon Didn’t Blow Up

Some people gaze at the moon and see wonder and possibility—dreams beyond the bounds of Earth and gravity, an ancient cosmic past that may hold the secrets of our future. Others look up and think that it sure would be interesting if that giant floating rock in the sky blew up.

Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat decidedly does not belong to the latter category, but his entry in the Menil Drawing Institute’s Wall Drawing series, which opened September 10, does find partial inspiration in a declassified, 190-page United States Air Force (USAF) document from 1959 regarding a strange and curious initiative known as Project A119.

According to an Air Force official Houstonia spoke with via email, “Project A119 was a Cold War-era USAF study that explored the feasibility of a lunar research flight involving a nuclear detonation on the Moon. The concept emerged during the late 1950s in the context of intense strategic and technological competition in space, but it did not progress beyond the study phase and was never carried out.”

The official further refers to the initiative as “a ‘historical concept study’ and not an executed program.” Kallat finds the methodical and mathematical nature of the document fascinating; he says it “sets out to undertake what one can only perceive…as a sort of diabolical act” (i.e. nuking the moon), but the straightforward, scientific language offsets what 2026 perceptions would view as something utterly fantastical and silly, the stuff of comic book supervillainy. At the time, though, Project A119 posited a genuine inquiry into the possible mechanics of lunar exploration a full decade before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s history-altering flight.

Kallat often looks to the moon and its relationship to humanity for inspiration. The Earth’s satellite recurs as a theme throughout his career, because he views it as “a form that is very close to [his] thinking.” In the moon, he says, he sees “nourishment,” “luminosity,” and “darkness”—a cosmic timekeeper that “maintains the rhythms of our bod[ies].” His 2010–2011 installation work Epilogue best embodies this preoccupation. Through a series of over 22,500 photos, Kallat depicts every phase of the moon from his father’s lifetime, from birth until his passing in 1998. Each moon is crafted using roti, an unleavened bread eaten in South Asia and across the diaspora; crumbs dot the black background.

With Wall Drawing: Jitish Kallat, the artist continues his preoccupation with the moon while delving further into how Project A119 speaks to him. This is not the first time the military documents have appeared in Kallat’s works. They show up in 2023–2025’s Conjectures on a paper sky and 2024–2026’s Lunar Redux. He sees Wall Drawing as “a certain kind of interesting conclusion” to his exploration of Project A119, partially because of its installation in Houston, a city more than a little well-versed in space travel.

The text and diagrams from Project A119 are printed directly on the Menil Drawing Institute’s wall. Over it, a glass panel etched with images of the moon and astronomical diagrams creates a physical—and thereby emotional—distance from Cold War sensibilities. Hand-drawn trompe l’oeil punctures, cracks, and breaks throughout the glass create a bleed-through effect between the two surfaces. It also bleeds perceptions of past and present, challenging viewers to reflect on how what was once an earnest scientific discussion seems quaintly retrograde today. But, if one zooms their mental lens out further, it’s not so difficult to imagine future generations looking upon the current era’s conjectures and questions with the very same bemusement. Kallat views the interplay between both planes as a “code,” an “animated” telling of the Project A119 story through redactions and stets.

“One thing that often happens with my work is that there is, I think, an analogy one can make between gestures we do when we try to see or understand something. We might hold the object close to us in space. We might take it away from us in space to see that object, to organize our focal length. We think back and forth to organize a thought,” he says. “What the work often does is it exaggerates the time and space that the artwork speaks from, which means that sometimes there’s a departure to another location in space, or a location in time, as a way to reflect on the present moment.”

To craft the glass—which needed to be opaque in some spots while remaining transparent in others—the artist consulted with Rice University’s Ajayan Research Group, part of the Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering. Kallat was not the first artist the group has collaborated with; one of their most notable projects involved creating the world’s blackest shade of black for conceptual artist Frederik de Wilde utilizing a carbon nanotube structure (similar, but not the same, as contemporary sculptor Anish Kapoor’s controversial development of Vantablack with Surrey NanoSystems).

The Ajayan Research Group knew how to adjust the transparency of glass using an electrosensitive, temperature-sensitive polymer. Research professor Robert Vajtai likens the technology to what airliners use in their windows. He says the technology works on a larger scale than the tiny portals one watches the clouds through on a Boeing 787, and Rice and Kallat found a vendor capable of producing the glass in the required 36-by-10-foot dimensions. Vajtai also notes the connection between Rice and the space program, adding an extra dimension of geographic resonance and relevance to Wall Drawing: “I think Jitish was inspired by the fact that the speech by JFK was on the Rice campus. It was in the stadium when he had that famous speech saying that we are going to the moon.”

Graduate student Gautam Chandrasekhar also worked with Kallat to develop and design materials that fit the artist’s overarching vision. Like Vajtai, he also appreciates the synchronicity between the final piece and the scientists chosen to help develop it. “Rice has always been in the picture,” he says. “[USAF] had the initial plan…to detonate the nuclear bomb on the moon, but then they later on reverted the plan, and they went on pursuing something bigger, which was going to the moon, taking a human to the moon…And then for an artwork related to all this, Rice is getting the opportunity to collaborate and then contribute to it.”

Although the Ajayan Research Group didn’t directly work on the installation, Kallat says Vajtai, Chandrasekhar, and others who helped secure the proper materials stopped by while he was constructing the final work to see how things were coming along. He praises their “warmth and generosity,” and their passion for helping him see things through to the end.

As with space travel, material science comprises a critical aspect of Wall Drawing’s efficacy, and it also features elsewhere in the building. Adjacent to the work, the Menil Drawing Institute currently shows Fragility, an exhibition centering the strength, versatility, and yet paradoxical frangibility of paper, tape, wool, and other media. One can easily draw parallels between the painted brokenness of Kallat’s glass and the delicate pin-puncture drawings by the late minimalist Zarina, or Robert Rauschenberg’s cardboard assemblages. When taken as a whole, there emerges a meditation on entropy and ephemerality, of what happens to art and archives when even the most advanced preservation techniques will always, by the laws of physics, fade.

And it starts by peering through Kallat’s special glass, as if an astronomer looking through a telescope. “In a way, there is this question, right? Is that glass wall a wall or a window?” he says. “Is it a barrier, or does it become a viewfinder?”