Dario Robleto - Ancient Beacons Long for Notice

Friday, December 5, 2025, at 7 PM

Location: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brown Auditorium

Tickets: $9 regular admission, $6 for ALH Members 

Co-presented by Art League Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Aurora Picture Show

Ancient Beacons Long for Notice is the third part of Dario Robleto’s trilogy exploring the history and legacy of the Golden Record. Launched in 1977, this record is attached to NASA’s Voyager I and II space probes, which were designed to explore the outer Solar System. The gold discs contain images, languages, music, and sounds representing the diversity of life and cultures on Earth. Created by a team of scientists led by Carl Sagan, the Golden Record was a hopeful gesture, carefully curated to present humanity’s “best face forward” in a first-contact scenario with other intelligent life forms; any traces of war, injustice, famine, or environmental decay were intentionally omitted. Ancient Beacons Long for Notice examines the implications of this ethos across time and space through new research on a forgotten document: the earliest audio recording of warfare, made in 1918 on the Western Front of WWI. Robleto’s film asks: “What is our moral obligation to fully account for our actions—the good and the bad—in perpetuity, off-planet, and to beings we have yet to confirm exist?"

The film screening is one of many programs in conjunction with Robleto’s exhibition at Art League Houston, If You Remember, I’ll Remember, celebrating his award as the 2025 Texas Artist of the Year. The exhibition will be on view from September 26 to December 21, 2025. You can learn more about the exhibition and award, here.

About the Artist

Dario Robleto was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1972. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1997. He lives and works in Houston, Texas.

Robleto’s work has been widely exhibited and is held in prominent collections, including the Menil Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Since 1997, he has had numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2024), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2024), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), Menil Collection (2014), the Baltimore Museum of Art (2014), the New Orleans Museum of Art (2012), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2011). In 2008, a ten-year survey exhibition, Alloy of Love, was organized by the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. In 2023, a second ten-year survey show, The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, was organized by the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. A major monograph accompanied each exhibition.

His work has been featured in numerous publications and media outlets, including Radiolab, Krista Tippett's On Being, and The New York Times. Robleto has held positions as an artist-in-residence, research fellow, and lecturer at various cultural and scientific institutions, including the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the SETI Institute, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Center for the Advancement and Study of Visual Arts at the National Gallery. During 2013-2014, he served as the Viola Frey Distinguished Visiting Professor at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. From 2016 to 2019, he was the Artist-in-Residence in Neuroaesthetics at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering, and from 2018 to 2023, he served as Artist-at-Large at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art. In 2015, he became a part of a distinguished team of scientists as the artistic consultant for “Breakthrough Message”—a multi-national initiative designed to stimulate intellectual and technical discussions about how and what to communicate if the ongoing search for intelligent life beyond Earth proves successful. 

His awards include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, the USA Rasmuson Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant, and a VIA ART grant. In 2016, he was appointed the Texas State 3-D Visual Artist.

Since 2019, he has been a member of the advisory board for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. In 2020, he served as a research consultant for the popular science television series Cosmos: Possible Worlds, which aired on National Geographic and Fox. He is currently working on his first book, The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System: Science, Emotion, and the Golden Record, co-authored with Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts, and is set to be published by Scribner, Simon & Schuster. In 2025, Robleto was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Middlebury College, and his newest film debuted at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

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Major funding and support for the exhibition and catalogue were generously provided by the Edaren Foundation, the Jacques Louis Vidal Charitable Fund, and the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.