0 G Space Art

On 4 April 1998, artist Frank Pietronigro flew aboard a NASA KC135 turbojet, often called the Vomit Comet, over the Gulf of Mexico from Houston’s Johnson Space Center and "experienced the awe-inspiring sensation of creating art in a microgravity environment as scientific research."

His his Research Project Number 34 was inspired by the Abstract Expressionist's famed experiments with gravity's effect on paint.  Carried out in free fall inside a kind of plastic tent, Pietronigro's "drift paintings" caught the serendipitous and spontaneous flow of the paint released from pastry tubes in the microgravity environment without the structural support of a traditional horizontally oriented canvas.  

Ah . . ., so much for the days when NASA had a budget for Abstract Expressionism in space.

Pietronigro continued to pursue art in microgravity by co-founding the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium in 2003, an international space art organization committed to increasing artists’ access to microgravity environments including parabolic flights and the International Space Station.