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Science Art Exhibits in 2016: The Early Edition

Historical illustrations of skin diseases, sculpted sea butterflies, the effects of rampant wildfires and more are in this edition of Symbiartic's scienceart roundup. Get to these galleries & museum exhibits before they pack up and move on...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


This collection of exhibits at the intersection of science and art should keep you entertained during the cold winter months, no matter where you are in the country. Get out of the house and enjoy!

EXHIBITS: NORTHEAST

Kavanagh Sea Butterflies

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FRAGILE BEAUTY: The Art & Science of Sea Butterflies
on view indefinitely
Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
1st Floor, Center, Sant Ocean Hall, Research Case
10th St. & Constitution Ave. NW
Washington, D.C.

Artist Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh and biological oceanographer Gareth Lawson bring the plight of tiny ocean pteropods—or “sea butterflies” —to light with larger-than-life sculptures. Kavanagh’s sculptures are based on tiny sea snails no bigger than a grain of sand. They honor the floating beauty of these animals, while evoking their struggle to survive in the face of ocean acidification. Gareth Lawson, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, studies ocean acidification and provided research that inspired Kavanagh’s creative work.

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Corning Glass

REVEALING THE INVISIBLE: The History of Glass and the Microscope
April 23, 2016 to March 19, 2017
The Corning Museum of Glass
One Museum Way
Corning, NY

Glass made it possible for scientists and artists to see tiny living creatures once invisible to the human eye. Revealing the Invisible: The History of Glass and the Microscope tells the stories of scientists’ and artists’ exploration of the microscopic world between the 1600s and the late 1800s. Their discoveries fed people’s hunger to learn more about nature, increasing the popularity of microscopes and driving improvements in scientific glass. These advances culminated in the 19th century with the advent of modern scientific glassmaking and the perfection of the microscope. Unleash your sense of discovery as you explore the invisible through historic microscopes, rare books, and period illustrations.

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New York Hall of Science

SCIENCE INSPIRES ART: Biodiversity/Extinction
October 10, 2015 - February 28, 2016
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th St
Corona, NY

View the artworks of 23 artists who were selected from more than 100 entrants from around the world for this year’s science-inspired exhibition about biodiversity and extinction. The co-jurors for this exhibition were Elizabeth Corr, manager of art partnerships at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Paula J. Ehrlich, president & CEO of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. This exhibition is the 17th International Art-Science Juried Exhibition organized by Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI).

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Tipping Point at Gallery Bergen

TIPPING POINTS: Artists Address the Climate Crises
December 8, 2015 - February 5, 2016
Gallery Bergen
Bergen Community College
400 Paramus Road
Paramus, NJ

Artists can use their skills and imagination to take on the issue of climate change and this work is now being seen in unprecedented numbers. The artists in Tipping Points use a variety of mediums including painting, photography, video, sculpture and drawing. Some have been partnering with scientists and environmental organizations. Others have been researching and documenting changes in glaciers and diminishing ice on trips to far northern regions of the planet; including boat trips to the Arctic and Antarctic. Some take a more poetic and imaginative approach to confront the seriousness of the issue and single biggest challenge of our time.

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Skin Disease Exhibit at Yale

HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF SKIN DISEASE: Selections from the New Sydenham Society Atlas 1860-1884
September 17, 2015 - January 10, 2016
Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
Sterling Hall of Medicine
333 Cedar Street
New Haven, CT

In this exhibit, Yale dermatologists Jean Bolognia and Irwin Braverman present the celebrated nineteenth century illustrations to a current clinical audience, making a relevant teaching point with each plate.  Twenty-five of the Atlas’ forty-nine plates are selected for display.  They depict cutaneous diseases ranging from the common, e.g. psoriasis and eczema, to the rare, e.g. iododerma and systematized epidermal nevi.  Examples of skin signs of systemic disease, including Addison’s disease, neurofibromatosis, and lupus erythematosus, are also shown.  The emotional toll which these chronic diseases inflicted upon patients is a striking feature of the many portraits on view. 

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Wayne Art Center Exhibit

EMERGENCE: Craft + Technology
December 4, 2015 - January 30, 2016
Wayne Art Center
413 Maplewood Avenue
Wayne, PA

This innovative new exhibition, Emergence: Craft + Technology, features work that exemplifies the ever-increasing intertwining of advanced digital processes with traditional hand-made craft. Whether through the use of computer design programs, CNC and automated tools, or 3D printing, we celebrate the use of new technologies in the production of state-of-the-art craft.

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Macro or Micro?

MACRO OR MICRO?: Challenging our Perceptions of Scale
Museum of Science
Art & Science Gallery
1 Science Park
Boston, MA

Today, researchers study the Earth at a variety of scales and with a variety of advanced equipment. While satellites take images of entire landscapes, electron microscopes use a beam of electrons to magnify objects up to 500,000 times.

The resulting images, which differ in scale of a million times or more, are featured side-by-side in Macro or Micro? Challenging our perceptions of scale. Geographer Stephen Young and biologist Paul Kelly, both with Salem State University, have gathered compelling images from their scientific research to test viewers' perceptions of the Earth. Challenge yourself to determine the scale of these stunning images — the patterns and similarities between macro and micro views may surprise you.

EXHIBITS: SOUTH

Courtney Mattison VA Museum of Contemporary Art

COURTNEY MATTISON: Sea Change
January 30 - April 17, 2016
Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art
2200 Parks Avenue
Virginia Beach, VA

Artist and ocean advocate Courtney Mattison creates large scale ceramic installations and sculptures inspired by science and marine biology. Her intricate hand-crafted porcelain works celebrate the fragile beauty of endangered coral reef ecosystems and promote awareness to conserve and protect our natural world.

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Cosmos Exhibit

COSMIC
January 15 - February 20, 2016
Art.Science.Gallery
916 Springdale Road
Building 2 #102
Austin, TX

Origin of the Universe. Evolution of the Universe. String Theory. Dark Matter. Dark Energy. Multiverse. Unification of Space + Time. Our Solar System. Cultural Cosmology. Art.Science.Gallery.’s science-inspired printmakers explore the cosmos in this far out exhibition for PrintAustin 2016, a city-wide printmaking festival.

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McClung Museum TN Birds Exhibit

BIRDS OF TENNESSEE: Celebrating the Centennial of the Tennessee Ornithological Society
October 5, 2015 - TBD
McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
1327 Circle Park Drive
Knoxville, TN

To celebrate the centennial of the Tennessee Ornithological Society (TOS), the museum is displaying fifty-six engravings and lithographs featuring the birds of Tennessee. Spanning two hundred years from 1731 to 1931, the prints on view are by twelve artists: Eleazar Albin, Mark Catesby, Xaviero Manetti, Alexander Wilson, Titian Ramsay Peale, Alexander Rider, Prideaux John Selby, John James Audubon, John Gould, Daniel Giraud Elliot, Henry Eeles Dresser, and Rex Brasher. The works on view are drawn from the museum’s extensive collection of over three thousand ornithological prints and are on display in the pull-out drawer case in the entrance to the Decorative Arts gallery.

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25 Yrs of Hubble

25 Years of the Hubble Space Telescope
July 12, 2015 - January 17, 2016
Museum of Arts and Sciences
4182 Forsyth Road
Baton Rouge, LA

Since its launch in April 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has provided stunning images of far-away stars, galaxies, and nebulae, and has shed light on many of the great mysteries of the universe. Today, HST continues to provide views of cosmic wonders never before seen. This exhibit displays some of the most intriguing images taken by HST over the past 25 years.

EXHIBITS: MIDWEST

Condensed Matter Community

CONDENSED MATTER COMMUNITY
by appointment through January 2016
Synchrotron Radiation Center: Home of Aladdin
3731 Schneider Dr.
Stoughton, WI

Condensed Matter Community is a site-specific curatorial project organized by Kristof Wickman and Evan Gruzis intended to generate a dialogue about science, aesthetics, progress and entropy. The project uses the site of a decommissioned particle accelerator facility in rural Wisconsin, The Synchrotron Radiation Center: Home of Aladdin, as an exhibition space to frame a selection of artworks, prior to forthcoming experiments.

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Numbers in Nature Museum of Science & Industry

NUMBERS IN NATURE: A Mirror Maze
new permanent exhibit
Museum of Science and Industry
5700 S. Lake Shore Drive
Chicago, IL

Patterns are everywhere if you know where to look! From the delicate nested spirals of a sunflower’s seeds, to the ridges of a majestic mountain range, to the layout of the universe, mathematical patterns abound in the natural world. Numbers in Nature: A Mirror Maze is a new permanent exhibit that will expose and explain the patterns that surround us.

As you enter Numbers in Nature, lenticular images and an immersive large-format film reveal these repeating patterns hidden throughout nature: spirals, occurrences of the "golden ratio" (ɸ), Voronoi patterns, and fractal branching. You will even discover patterns and ratios found in your own body and in centuries of music, art, and architecture so that you'll never look at the world the same way again.

EXHIBITS: WEST

Jim Jacobs in Raw & Cooked Exhibit

RAW & COOKED
January 15 – March 11, 2016
Rio Gallery
300 S. Rio Grande St.
Salt Lake City, UT

This exhibition explores the relationship between culture and nature, one of the oldest human tropes. In this recurring schism, humans believe ourselves to be of nature and, alternately, distinct from it. As we search texts and traditions to support either position, the persistence of the trope itself is underscored; it’s an impasse, shifting in form. It’s also an embrace of or a resistance to the natural world that produced us; from which we believe we stand apart.

In Raw and Cooked, artists Jim Jacobs, Joshua Winegar, and Paul Crow present work within this nature/culture dialectic. Jacobs begins with an ancient horticultural intervention, the graft, to focus our attention on a literal intersection of the natural and the human-made. Winegar takes on the natural world as a partner in a conversation with his psyche, alternately responding to, and intervening in, the world which surrounds him. Crow maps the span of his life onto the time frame of the human awareness of global climate change. Each artist begins with material that exists before agency and brings it through a process of intervention to manifest a hybrid: the artist in dialogue both with the world and without, and with an inner understanding of that world.

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Bellevue Arts Museum

ATOMS + BYTES: Redefining Craft in the Digital Age
March 4 – June 26, 2016
Bellevue Arts Museum
510 Bellevue Way NE
Bellevue, WA

Today's makers have access to a wider array of tools, materials, and processes than ever before. Digital methods such as scanning and imaging, coding, CNC-milling, and rapid prototyping not only influence the way objects are designed, manufactured, and distributed, but also change the terms of our relationships with them.

Atoms + Bytes: Redefining Craft in the Digital Age will showcase works by 30 international and local makers situated at the intersection of the digital and the analogue worlds. These artists, craftspeople, and designers excel in material practices that span millennia of craft traditions, while drawing on cutting-edge digital tools to develop innovative ways of making. The integration of these atoms and bytes, building blocks of matter and information, generates the new forms and typologies that shape our changing world.

Through the presentation of works that embody mergers of traditional and digital processes and materials, Atoms + Bytes reframes the conversation about the place of technology within the historical trajectory of object-making and offers an invitation to reevaluate the way we place value on craft and define "hand-made."

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Fires of Change UArizona

FIRES OF CHANGE
November 19, 2015 – April 3, 2016
University of Arizona Museum of Art
1031 North Olive Road
Tucson, AZ

The worlds of art and fire science come together in Fires of Change. Curated by Flagstaff installation artist Shawn Skabelund, Fires of Change explores the increase in severity, size, and number of wildfires in the Southwest and their impact on the landscape through the eyes of artists. Through the art, visitors can get a sense of the true impact of the fires, from human to environmental.

Fires of Change is an NEA and Joint Fire Science Consortium funded exhibition originating at the Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff. Eleven artists spent a week in 2014 in fire science boot camp with the Southwest Fire Science Consortium and the Landscape Conservation Initiative to learn about the impact of wildfire in Northern Arizona.  They then spent the year creating original works in reaction to their experiences.

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Nina Antze Botanical Paintings in Colored Pencil

CALIFORNIA FLORA: Botanical Paintings in Colored Pencil by Nina Antze
January 7, 2016 – April 25, 2016
Please call ahead 707-527-9277 x 107 to see exhibit
Heron Hall, Laguna Environmental Center
900 Sanford Road,
Santa Rosa, CA

California Flora is an exhibit of botanical paintings by colored pencil artist Nina Antze. The paintings were created over the past eight years and focus mainly on California natives. Also included are paintings documenting Luther Burbank’s Experiment Farm in Sebastopol and a piece from the Alcatraz Florilegium, a documentation of the plants of the Alcatraz gardens.

Nina Antze is a botanical artist and quilt maker living in Northern California. She has a degree in Fine Art from San Francisco State University and has a Certificate in Botanical Illustration from the New York Botanical Gardens. She teaches Colored Pencil classes in the Botanical Certificate Program at Filoli Gardens, at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts and around the Bay Area.

Her botanical paintings and colored pencil drawings have been exhibited in New York, at the Huntington Library, and at Filoli Gardens and her quilts have won numerous awards. She works in colored pencil, watercolor pencil and fabric. Her botanicals can be viewed at her website, www.pcquilt.com

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Alcatraz Florilegium

THE ALCATRAZ FLORILEGIUM: A Special Botanical Art Exhibit
January 16 - 29, 2016
University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley
200 Centennial Drive
Berkeley, CA

The Northern California Society of Botanical Artists (NCSBA) in collaboration with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the Garden Conservancy has created a florilegium, a series of botanical paintings, to document the plants of The Gardens of Alcatraz. The UC Botanical Garden is thrilled to welcome the NCSBA to exhibit this special showing of the Alcatraz Florilegium, with over 70 drawings and paintings, in our beautiful Julia Morgan Hall.

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Monterey

TENTACLES: The Astounding Lives of Octopuses, Squid, and Cuttlefishes
April 12, 2014 - September 2016
Monterey Bay Aquarium
886 Cannery Row
Monterey, CA

Journey to a world of undersea magicians, masters of disguise and quick-change artists. Our special exhibition is the largest, most diverse living exhibit ever created to showcase these amazing animals. You won't believe your eyes.

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Lucy Conklin

ELEVATIONS: Art by Lucy Conklin
October 18, 2014 - January 11, 2015
Hayward Shoreline Interpretive Center
4901 Breakwater Ave.
Hayward, CA

A walk from Mount Diablo to the Hayward shoreline would cross through many ecosystems, each with their own unique set of inhabitants. Some of these creatures have very specific needs and limited ranges. Others are more adaptable and seem perfectly at home in an urban backyard. This collection of work by science illustrator Lucy Conklin explores the vast array of wildlife in the East Bay, and some of our unusual visitors. Whether they are long time residents, returning to their natural habitat after a long hiatus, or an oddity passing through unexplained, their journeys have a story.

EXHIBITS: ABROAD

Ontario Science Centre

ART AROUND THE CENTRE: Science Art Installations
ongoing
Ontario Science Centre
770 Don Mills Road
Toronto, ON  CANADA

Creative inspiration is at the heart of both science and art – and our array of indoor and outdoor art installations blend art and science in delightful and insightful ways. Current installations include:

BEAM Robot Fish: Controlled by solar cells, this BEAM robot sculpture (Biology, Electronic, Aesthetics, Mechanics) is designed to live, feed and fend for itself in the ocean.
Cloud: Check out this mesmerizing art installation composed of hundreds of rotating glass panels designed to mimic the changes of state from solid to liquid to gas.
Jacquard Coverlet: Marvel at this wall hanging woven on our antique Jacquard loom by volunteers. Like a computer, the loom’s mechanism uses binary to create the pattern.

View the complete list of science art installations.
 

Do you know of any exhibits or have an upcoming exhibit that should be included on this list? Send me an email at symbiartic (dot) km (at) gmail (dot) com, or tweet me @eyeforscience with the deets. If it's scienceart related, it's fair game.