The traveling exhibition ARX3 pairs artists and scientists, while Brains and Beauty at SMoCA draws on neuroaesthetics, to visualize transformative research.
PHOENIX, AZ—Arizona-based textile artist and biodesigner Shah Noor Shafqat recently used spores to cultivate fungi resembling threads to create garment-like structures, working with genomics researcher Angel Algarin to symbolize the invasive nature of stigma experienced by people living with mental illness.
Today, their collaborative installation titled Colonized (2024), made with mycelia and recycled polyester on a fabric dress form, is featured in the ARx3 exhibition that appears at several Phoenix locations as part of a multi-year effort to convey scientific information through visual art. Across town, the Brains and Beauty: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience exhibition at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art is also examining intersections of science and art, albeit with a very different strategy and goal.
“We’re using a visual lens to express research to a general audience,” explains Shafqat, whose practice centers on material innovation and sustainable methods that reflect relationships between art, nature, and science. “Art, especially design, is a problem-solving method—not just a form of creative expression.”
Shafqat is one of eight artists currently participating in the Artist + Researcher program organized by Phoenix Bioscience Core, a life science innovation hub located in the city’s Roosevelt Row arts district.
Following a soft opening at Bentley Gallery, the ARx3 exhibition moved to the College of Medicine at University of Arizona, before a scheduled run at Arizona Science Center, where previous efforts to showcase art and science have included an exhibition focused on Leonardo da Vinci.
Artist Jeremie Bacpac Franco and cancer researcher Kamel Lahouel collaborated on Metastasize vs. Mathematize (2024) for the ARx3 exhibition, creating a wall work featuring forms representing cancer cells made with aluminum, metal flake automotive paint, and acrylic lacquer overlaid with projections of a complex mathematical formula developed by Lahouel to prompt early identification of cell mutations related to cancer.
Artist Tra Bouscaren worked with scientist Ana Gervassi to devise Line Translation Error 1 (2024) and Line Translation Error 2 (2024), using metallic photo scans of broken zippers and his own fingerprints along with neon lighting and lab clamps to suggest mutations that can occur in the transfer of genetic information.
Meanwhile, there’s another exhibition in metropolitan Phoenix that’s highlighting connections between art and science using a vastly different approach in which scientific research serves to illuminate the importance of art in human experience.
For Brains and Beauty: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, curator Laura Ramson Hales collaborated with neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee, director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics in Philadelphia, to foreground works that demonstrate the science of aesthetic experience.
We’re bringing a neurological perspective to how people view art.
“We’re bringing a neurological perspective to how people view art, considering what’s going on in the viewer’s mind,” explains Hales, who says the exhibition also “addresses different applications and implications of the biological basis of aesthetic experience for architecture, medicine, and marketing.”
The SMoCA exhibition includes works by over twenty artists organized into sections based on “the aesthetic triad” presented by Chatterjee and co-author Oshin Vartanian in their 2022 book The Aesthetic Triad: Brain, Beauty, and Art.
Wall text describes the triad as a “framework that explains the involvement of three different neural systems in the emergence of the aesthetics experience”: the sensory motor, emotion-valuation, and knowledge-meaning systems. Each section introduces the corresponding system using an animated illustration of the brain and brief explanatory text, and includes numerous artworks chosen to represent it.
The sensory motor system concerns how the brain notes visual elements such as color, light, and motion, and specific elements such as faces and landscapes, according to museum didactics. The emotion-valuation and knowledge-meaning systems respectively address the way seeing an object we find beautiful brings us pleasure and the fact that we’re more likely to appreciate a work of art if we know something about the artist and its cultural or social context.
The exhibition includes works by several renowned artists—including Marina Abramovíc, Refik Anadol, and Wayne Thiebaud, whose oil-on-canvas painting Four Ice Cream Cones (1964) serves as an example of an artwork that activates the brain’s emotion-valuation system. Museum materials explain that “the brain is hard-wired to help keep us alive, as is evident when we eat foods we like or are in love” and note that Thiebaud’s impasto technique capturing the texture of ice cream enhances the effect.
Brains and Beauty also features numerous artists based in the Southwest, including Monica Aissa Martinez, whose extensive body of work centers on drawings of human figures, animals, and viruses. For this show, she’s created Thought Patterns (casein, egg tempera, gesso, and micaceous iron oxide on canvas; 2024), with its elaborate intersecting lines that suggest “a system of highly interconnected brain regions” called the default-mode network, which some scientists consider “an ideal state of mind for creative thought.”
Art has a way of speaking to the masses.
Despite the different strategies and goals embodied in ARx3 and Brains and Beauty, both exhibitions are contributing to ongoing conversations about the nature and value of intersections between art and science.
Whereas one prompts viewers to consider the ways the workings of the brain impact their own reactions to various artworks, the other is forging relationships between individual artists and researchers that have the potential to impact their future work.
“This was the first time I had engaged with an artist about how science meets art but hopefully I’ll be able to work with more artists in the future,” reflects Algarin, who says his Colonized collaboration with Shafqat about the social stigma of illnesses has applications in myriad fields, including the HIV prevention at the heart of his own research.
Algarin adds, “Art has a way of speaking to the masses.”
