Elizabeth Moran

The New York Public Library’s Rose Main Reading Room boasts 52-foot-tall ceilings displaying James Wall Finn’s 1911 murals of vibrant skies and billowing clouds. Rendered as perpetual twilight, the glowing sky recalls Enlightened thought, an idealization of the reality that exists outside the library. It was beneath this imagined sky that the first fact-checkers defined reputable reporting as we know it today.

In 2016, after conservators determined the mural had sustained irreparable damage, a contractor recreated the murals on canvas and installed them over the original painted ceiling. A rendering of a rendering.

In 2020 I documented this mural using a telephoto moving camera. Rose Main Reading Room (East) presents a slow-moving sky. Pink clouds swirl in and out of frame, a meditation of light and ever-shifting movement. The video is presented in a loop with no obvious beginning or end. As a digital video, the Enlightened sky is transformed into a screensaver.

The mural’s decorative border occasionally enters the frame, confusing the view. The illusion of a moving sky abruptly shifts to a still image seen from a moving camera—a jarring shift of perspective.