“With my art, I work to impart to the viewer a heightened sense of our place in this wildly wonderful universe,” says the artist Karen Tompkins, who’s always been drawn to astronomy and the constellations. Her work examines any and all elements of the cosmos, from tiny subatomic particles to massive galactic filaments. Tompkins studies astronomy. During her residency at the American Academy in Rome, for instance, she researched Galileo at the Vatican Rare Manuscripts Library. His discoveries of sunspots and the craters on the moon inspired her most recent series of paintings. Covered in gold leaf, rays flashing across the canvas, each piece captures the beautiful mystery of the sky and what exists beyond. —Jeanne Malle