“And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won’t come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.” – LeRoi Jones

Counting Stars is a ceiling mural commissioned by United Airlines for their United Club at Newark Liberty Airport. This work is inspired by two disparate sources. One recreates portions of illustrations from Johann Bayer’s 1603 star atlas, Uranometria. The second is a poem by Newark native, writer and activist, Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones). The image depicts the constellation Cygnus, which takes the form of a giant swan in flight against a luminous night sky. Trailing in it’s wake is a stunning array of twinkling stars and billowing cloud formations at the opposing ends of the composition. The curling, “auspicious” clouds, or Xiangyun, and the Adire (batik) patterned sky ground the work, respectively, in early Asian and West African contributions to the field of astronomy.