Tom Van Sant

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Tom Van Sant is a sculptor, painter, and conceptual artist. In his professional work he has executed over sixty major sculpture and mural commissions for public spaces around the world. These include the international airports of Honolulu, Taipei and Los Angeles, the civic centers of Los Angeles, Newport Beach and Inglewood, and corporate centers in Taiwan, Manila, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Honolulu and San Francisco. Van Sant has had fifteen one-man exhibits in the United States, Europe and Australia. His art is represented in public and private collections throughout the world.

Van Sants' professional skills and intellectual interests range to architectural design, city planning, art education and advanced technical invention. His large scale conceptual art projects of the 1980's led to the creation of The GeoSphere Project, an ambitions environmental display system designed to illustrate the issues of Earth resource management.

The GeoSphere Image marks a milestone in cartographic history. It is the first satellite map of Earth, showing the real world it appears from space. The work required one year of effort on the world's most powerful graphics computers by Van Sant, technical director Van Warren of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and assisted by Jim Knighton and Leo Blume. Additional funding and technical assistance provided by NASA, USGS, NOAA and The Maggie Eastwood Foundation. The image was first published as the title page of the National Geographic World Atlas.

Al Gore cited Mr. Van Sant for this beautiful and useful 3d image of the Earth in the film An Inconvenient Truth.

In 1992, Mr. Van Sant created an installation called the Earth Situation Room, an interactive project which feature visualizations of earth systems and changes. This project was first shown at ECO-92, the Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro and was sponsored in part by the United Nations Environmental Program and Al Gore.

In the summer of 2007 he participated in the Chicago public art exhibition "Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet."