Galleries
Every issue includes beautiful artwork selected by the office of Cultural Programs at the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS). Artists included in the pages of the magazine grapple with many of the same topics discussed by our authors—climate change, big data, genetics, and surveillance, to name a few—in thoughtful, visually compelling ways.
Fall 2020: What Is To Be Done?
Visions of the Space Frontier
Chinese citizens cheer for a Soviet rocket in a poster from 1957, reflecting the friendly relationship that would come to an end only a few years later. A Prometheus-like figure reaches for the cosmos in a Soviet poster with one hand while holding a hammer and a sickle in the other. View Gallery
ArtSciConverge at Sagehen Creek Field Station
STPMJ Architects, “Invisible Barn,” photographed by Faerthen Felix, 2015. Artists have participated since 2011 in the ArtSciConverge residency program at the University of California, Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Truckee, California. View Gallery
Artologica
Michele Banks, Indigo Coronavirus, 2020, ink on Yupo paper, 12 x 16 inches. Paintings inspired by COVID-19 Michele Banks is a Washington, DC-based artist who finds inspiration in how viruses and bacteria affect humans, and how in turn humans affect them, through climate change, antibiotic use, and other impacts on the earth. View Gallery
Trucks of Morocco
Stefan Ruiz, Truck No. 8, Morocco, 2001. Almost 20 years ago while on an assignment in Morocco, photographer Stefan Ruiz came across a series of trucks and was captivated by their appearance. View GallerySummer 2020: Who Benefits From Science?
Naming Nature
James Prosek, “What Once Was Is No Longer (1851)” (2019) As an undergraduate at Yale University in the 1990s, I read the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost for the first time. View Gallery
Around Nature
Juanli Carrión, OSSVLC (Outer Seed Shadow: Valencia) (2016–17). Five hundred years ago, the Spanish government and private investors funded a commercial trip led by Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián Elcano that would become the first journey around the world. View Gallery
The Metro Project
Underground public transit systems play a pivotal role in the day-to-day functioning of cities around the world. They also contribute to a city’s unique visual identity. Captivated by the overlooked beauty of his hometown transit system, Chris M. View GallerySpring 2020: Slowing Science Down
Unintended Beauty
The human mind is capable of extraordinary things. We create systems, structures and machines that allow us to provide for our lives and answer our questions about the universe. Machines tell the story of our needs and desires, our hopes and follies, our visions for the future. View Gallery
Time, Place, & Identity
Born in Mochudi, Botswana, the artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum merges ideas of ancient mythologies with scientific theories in her work. Sunstrum is interested in topics such as the origins of time, geological concepts, and ideas about the universe. View Gallery
Designs for Different Futures
For much of the modern era, the desire to envision and potentially shape the future has been informed by ideals that are progressive or even utopian in spirit. Artists and designers are often inspired by the belief that the future can be not only substantially different but also better, morally as well as technologically. View GalleryWinter 2020: Science, the Endless Frontier at 75
Neural Glitch
Mario Klingemann, 2018 Mario Klingemann describes himself as “an artist and a skeptic with a curious mind.” His work spans and incorporates a wide range of tools and technologies, including neural networks and deep learning, computer code and algorithms, and artificial intelligence and generative art (work produced by autonomous or semi-autonomous systems). View Gallery
Shaping Our Genetic Futures
Paul Vanouse, America Project, 2016, spittoon and video projection. Photo by Molly Renda, courtesy of the artist. “There is a strange pleasure in the performance of DNA extraction, live in an art museum. View Gallery
Nano Portraiture
Artist and chemist Michal Gavish wants viewers to consider the complexity and fragility of humans’ inner biology. In her 3-D drawing and painting installations, she magnifies imagery of DNA and protein structures to a human scale. View GalleryFall 2019: The 35th Anniversary Issue
Fragmentation
Seth Clark’s collages and sculpture focus on deteriorating architecture. Usually designed for permanence, buildings are constantly being challenged by geological, meteorological, and other external forces. Clark enjoys studying the way they fall apart and the way we struggle to keep them up to date. View Gallery
On Earth: Imaging, Technology, and the Natural World
Since its inception, photography has testified to the complex relationship between humans, nature, and technology. In the wake of great nineteenth-century landscape photographers, a new generation of artists are employing contemporary imaging techniques to observe the natural world and the effects of human existence on it. View Gallery
Feedlots
Mishka Henner is a Belgian artist who lives and works in Manchester, England. He is known for prints and videos that appropriate image-rich technologies, including Google Earth, Google Street View, and YouTube. He described his inspiration and process for creating the Feedlots series for the Los Angeles Times: I first came across these feedlots on Google Earth and had no idea what I was seeing. View GallerySummer 2019: The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse
Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial
Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, coorganized by Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum, and Cube design museum in Kerkrade, Netherlands, features over 60 projects to demonstrate how designers are collaborating with scientists, engineers, environmentalists, academics, and other stakeholders to find inventive and promising solutions to the environmental and social challenges confronting humanity today. View Gallery
Studio + Laboratory: Workshops of Knowledge
Be it artistic works or scientific discoveries, the end results are generally all that remain visible of the creative process. What happens behind closed doors in the laboratory or studio tends to be as invisible as it is mysterious. View Gallery
Walking in Antarctica
Walking in Antarctica is inspired by Helen Glazer’s experience as a 2015 grantee of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Since returning from her trip, she has been working with a rich cache of raw material, creating the photographic prints, sculpture, and an accompanying narrative that comprise the project. View GallerySpring 2019: Human Gene Editing
From Lucid Stead
The exhibition From Lucid Stead: Prints and Works by Phillip K. Smith III is on view at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, from March 18 through September 13, 2019. View Gallery
Pending Memories
The latest series of photographs by Cuban artist Adrian Fernandez portray the backside of billboards situated in surreal landscapes. The complex structures and unexpected shapes are suggestive of Russian constructivism, but the more interesting question is what is on the other side. View GalleryWinter 2019: Higher Education Re-Imagined
Sites Unseen & Orbital Reflector
Trevor Paglen is an artist and writer whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, and engineering. With a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, Paglen blurs disciplinary boundaries in unfamiliar and at times unsettling ways. View GalleryFall 2018: The Future of Work
Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks
In this series of images of what remains of the Corona project, Julie Anand and Damon Sauer investigate our relationship to the vast networks of information that encircle the globe. The Corona project was a CIA and US Air Force surveillance initiative that began in 1959 and ended in 1972. View Gallery
Sougwen Chung
Multimedia artist Sougwen Chung has been collaborating with robots since 2015, exploring the connections between handmade and machine-made designs as a way to understand the relationship between humans and computers. Her multifaceted artistic practice also includes filmmaking, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. View Gallery
William Utermohlen
William Utermohlen was born in south Philadelphia in 1933. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1951 to 1957 and on the G.I. bill at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford, England, from 1957 to 1958. View GallerySpring 2017: Climate Engineering
Glass Microbiology
Luke Jerram’s multidisciplinary arts practice involves the creation of sculptures, installations, and live artworks. He lives in the United Kingdom and creates work across the globe. Glass Microbiology is a collection of glass models of human viruses. View GalleryWinter 2017: The Energy Transition
Fashion, Animal, Sound
The images in Steve Miller’s Fashion, Animal, Sound series are all X-rays. He began experimenting with the technology decades ago because it enabled him to re-invent the notion of a portrait by looking beyond the surface and beneath the flesh, and he later extended it to other life forms and inanimate objects. View GalleryFall 2016: The Criminalization of Immigration
Chirality
Matthew Shlian is an artist and designer working in paper. He uses the traditions of origami, kirigami, and paper engineering to transform flat materials into 3D sculptures and he applies his experience in collaborative research with scientists at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. View GallerySummer 2016: A New Global Environment for Space Policy
Detroit Industry Murals
The Detroit Industry murals by prominent Mexican artist Diego Rivera pay tribute to Detroit’s manufacturing base and labor force. In the first half of the twentieth century, Detroit was the center of America’s most important industry—automobile manufacturing—and it was a symbol of modernity and the power of labor and capitalism. View Gallery
Cassini Mission to Saturn
The Cassini mission to Saturn is a joint endeavor of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the European Space Agency, and the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana. Cassini is a sophisticated robotic spacecraft orbiting the ringed planet and studying the Saturnian system in detail. View GallerySpring 2016: Summit on Human Gene Editing
