In October 2018 Linda Dalrymple Henderson, the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History, received a Leonardo Pioneer Award for her “inspiring work at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology.” The award was given by the journal Leonardo on its 50th anniversary in a ceremony at the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Technologies at the University of Texas at Dallas, the home institution of Leonardo editor Roger Malina. Students in ATEC created the awards in the form of skateboards that they personalized according to the recipient’s work. On its underside Henderson’s skateboard bears a projection of a four-dimensional hypercube outlined in magnetic paint beneath the all-black surface color. As part of the event Henderson gave a seminar at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at UT Dallas on “The Ether of Space as the Medium of Early 20th-Century Art.”
Henderson’s first book was The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, 1983), which MIT Press published in an enlarged edition in 2013. The new edition tracks the history of the spatial fourth dimension through the later decades of the 20th century during which it emerged again as a central theme in culture. Her 1998 book Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works recovered the science of the early 20th century (X-rays, radioactivity, the Herztian waves of wireless telegraphy, and the ether of space) to which Duchamp was responding. In 2002 she co-edited with Bruce Clarke the anthology From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, based on a 1997 conference at the University of Texas at Austin. Henderson is currently at work on a book project titled "The Energies of Modernism: Art, Science, and Occultism in the Early 20th Century."