PST ART: Art & Science Collide

Clifford V. Johnson’s students at the University of Southern California know him as a professor of physics and astronomy fascinated by the nature of space and time.

But they may not know that he’s also on a quest to put science back into mainstream culture, and that he has been advising artists, filmmakers, and other storytellers about how to incorporate science into their work.

“For me, science and art are partners in how I engage with the world,” says Johnson. “I feel like a more complete individual in the universe when I’m using both fields to study the cosmos and express myself in it.” He himself uses drawing to convert scientific ideas and advances into visual narratives. For instance, he wrote and drew a graphic novel titled The Dialogues that illustrates conversations about a range of topics that involve science, from black holes to cooking.

Johnson was part of a panel of scientists and artists who gathered to discuss the overlap of their fields during the recent announcement of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the latest in a series of Getty-led, region-wide collaborations among Southern California cultural organizations. Past Pacific Standard Time (PST ART) initiatives have explored art in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980 and Latin American and Latino art in connection with Southern California. This newest PST ART will present a range of exhibitions and programs focused on the intersections of art and science from ancient times to the present day. While these two fields may have drifted apart in popular culture, overemphasizing their differences ignores key advances they have made together, such as how photography revolutionized the depiction of the cosmos.

Supported by more than $5 million in Getty Foundation research grants, 45 cultural, educational, and scientific institutions throughout Southern California are now hard at work planning exhibitions and programs scheduled for the fall of 2024 that delve into the many ways that science and art have come together and come into conflict to learn from each other and build on shared insights.

“Art and science share a common commitment to curiosity and a quest for the unseen,” says multidisciplinary artist Tavares Strachan, who will be included in several PST exhibitions. “Whether that is a scientist using a microscope to look at what is invisible to the human eye or an artist like me studying scientific pioneers who have disappeared from, or were never included, in the history books, both of us are driven to explore. It’s what we do and how we survive.”

This shared curiosity can also be harnessed to engage with the challenging issues that humanity faces today. From climate change and environmental racism to the current pandemic and artificial intelligence, the new PST presents many opportunities to weave together science and art to confront urgent problems of our time and shape new visions of our past and future through curiosity, creativity, and community.

Bridging Art and Science

When agricultural scientist George Washington Carver was named “the Black Leonardo” by Time magazine in 1941, he was already well known as a pioneer of plant-based engineering. Carver’s curiosity drove him to experiment with crop rotations and peanut patents and develop his horse-drawn vehicle, the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, as a mobile classroom for teaching farmers revolutionary new practices to achieve higher crop yields and healthier soil. But Carver was also a dedicated artist who brought a similar spirit of invention to artmaking. He developed his own paints and practiced across a variety of media. For its PST exhibition, the California African American Museum (CAAM) will celebrate Carver as an innovator who tackled issues of the day with both an artistic and scientific point of view and also continues to inspire current generations of artists, scientists, and engineers.

“Many of the ideas that scientists are beginning to think about again—like the interconnectedness of forest life and mycelium, or sustainable agriculture practices and organic farming—Carver was thinking about and advocating,” says Cameron Shaw, executive director and chief curator at CAAM who is leading an interdisciplinary team of collaborators. “We’re now seeing many of his ideas as cutting-edge and the way we should reshape the world.”

As an artist, Carver used sustainable materials such as peanut- and clay-derived dyes and pigments in his many weavings and still-life paintings. CAAM’s exhibition World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project will showcase Carver’s rarely seen artworks alongside his laboratory equipment, paint samples, and formulas. Visitors will also have the opportunity to see how his legacy has inspired contemporary artists and activists who share his interests in nature, biology, and sustainability, says Shaw. “When people we define as artists, or scientists, or some other form of activist are represented in the same room, there’s an opportunity to view the interconnectedness of their ideas and see potential new connections and solutions.”

Solving Big Problems

One critical area where artists and scientists are working together to solve problems is the environment, whether on issues of climate change or ecological justice. A number of PST exhibitions will examine the outsized, often harmful influence humans have on the natural world, and show how science and art might work together to draw attention to these critical issues.

Imagine relief sculptures that latch onto existing ocean seawalls and rebuild biodiversity by encouraging marine species to grow and flourish on these man-made structures. This project by Australia’s Reef Design Lab is just one of the art and science collaborations that will be included in Sea Change: Toward New Environmentalisms in the Pacific Ocean at the Orange County Museum of Art. The exhibition will showcase artists who respond to urgent ecological crises in the Pacific Ocean, which at 30 percent of the earth’s surface makes up the world’s largest body of water. At this moment, increasing water temperatures and acidity are destroying the Pacific’s coral reefs and fisheries. Rising sea levels are displacing coastal communities. And plastic pollution threatens marine life and air quality.

Sea Change will reveal how ocean scientists and artists are working not only to raise awareness of these dramatic shifts, but also to inspire positive change and sustainability. The exhibition will include activists working in diverse environments from Asia and Oceania to South America, such as Ecuadorian artist Paul Rosero Contreras, who collaborates with marine biologists to produce videos and installations documenting the effects of ocean acidification on the Galapagos Islands.

Other PST projects will draw on biology and material science to investigate environmental racism. The exhibition Sinks: Places We Call Home at Self-Help Graphics (SHG) in Boyle Heights will demonstrate how policies and practices that govern land use create and perpetuate inequality in Los Angeles, particularly in communities of color. Sinks will study industrial waste and soil contamination created by two manufacturing sites near SHG: the Exide Battery plant in Vernon and the former Athens Tank Farm (Exxon/Mobil Oil Corporation) site in Willowbrook.

LA-based artists Beatriz Jaramillo and Maru Garcia are partnering with SHG and scientists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles to conduct data-driven research into the devastating ramifications these sites have had on local communities and the environment. They will perform soil sampling and bio-remediation studies near Vernon and bring voices from Willowbrook communities into the exhibition through a collaborative installation. An interactive component will use virtual reality to demonstrate how contamination can be reversed to restore community access to healthy air and land.

Indigenous Science and Technologies

From seed saving to drought resistant planting techniques, Indigenous technologies and practices draw on long histories of Native peoples’ interactions with their natural surroundings. Many PST projects will center diverse forms of Indigenous knowledge and position Native peoples as forward-thinking innovators who are well equipped to meet today’s ecological challenges.

“I would like to see the world recognize, and still find value, within the traditional,” says textile artist Porfirio Gutiérrez, who works to revitalize and preserve original Zapotec natural dye techniques. Gutiérrez’s knowledge about which plants to use for various dyes, along with his techniques required to hand-weave textiles, has been passed down through generations. He will collaborate with the Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College on the PST project Cosmovisión Indígena to trace the history, science, and contemporary uses of Mesoamerican dye-making and weaving and to explore the mythology, ritual, and storytelling used to preserve and pass on these sustainable technologies.

For other projects, Indigenous knowledge will be applied to imagine the future. In the 1970s, Native American artists and authors began creating science fiction as a means of claiming outer space as sovereign territory, speaking back to racism, and imagining alternative futures to counteract the traumas of genocide, land theft, and cultural assault inflicted by European colonization of the United States. Today, Indigenous Futurism is a robust and thriving artistic genre devoted to exploring Native peoples as techno-savvy commentators on the present and powerful agents in shaping the world of tomorrow.

At the Autry Museum of the American West, the exhibition Indigenous Futures, or How to Survive and Thrive After the Apocalypse will trace visions of the future in contemporary Native art that reflect ideas of cultural survival and environmental sustainability. From remixing Star Wars characters, which traffic freely in native stereotypes, to envisioning Indigenous presence in futuristic landscapes, Indigenous Futures will demonstrate how Native artists are helping us fundamentally rethink centuries of expansionist actions that have contributed to the current climate crises—and the future apocalypse that could be coming for us all.

Designing the Future

The Autry’s exhibition is but one of many PST ART projects that engage with technology and the future. For researchers at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, these themes took shape as a question. Is it possible, they wondered, to design a socially and environmentally sustainable city for seven billion people?

Planet City is the response, an exhibition that will draw on groundbreaking work of artists, futurists, and scholars to envision what the world might look like if humanity reversed urban sprawl and retreated into a single, hyperdense megalopolis (see magazine cover image). This unprecedented man-made environment would house the world’s entire human population, allowing the rest of the planet’s landscapes to revert to wilderness. The centerpiece of Planet City will be a scale model depicting the imaginary city’s built environment, created by a team of Hollywood animators and visual effects artists. An animation of Earth as seen from space will show how this experiment in ultra-concentrated urbanism could impact our world’s landforms, waters, geologies, atmospheres, temperatures, and weather patterns.

For a team at Craft Contemporary, the future of sustainable building design is rooted in nature. Living materials such as algae, microorganisms, and silkworms offer eco-friendly alternatives that would consume fewer materials, generate less pollution, and use less energy. At the same time, 3D printing, digital tools, and robotics are transforming the way we build, allowing people to construct with more precision and less waste. Nature Near: New Materials and Technology for Architecture and Design will be the first exhibition to survey the most promising and pragmatic building materials and methods at the intersection of nature, science, and craft.

The Power of Sharing Perspectives

Regardless of each exhibition’s individual theme, partners are embracing teamwork and forming communities of inquiry.

“Projects co-produced by artists and scientists help us to move off of the idea that great work is the product of individual genius,” says Lisa Cartwright, professor of visual art, communication, and science studies at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and lead researcher for Oceanographic Art and Science: Navigating the Pacific, the PST ART project of UCSD’s Institute of Arts and Humanities and Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. “Work that truly changes how we think, that helps us imagine our way forward through crisis, is always more collaborative, more interdisciplinary, and more dependent on community engagement than we probably realize.”

Navigating the Pacific will focus on the collaborative mission of Scripps to understand and protect the planet. The project will bring together diverse teams of artists, scientists, and writers to research the ways oceanographers and seafaring Pacific Islanders have engaged in artistic practice to design maps, vessels, and instruments to measure and visually render the ocean. Navigating the Pacific will also highlight Indigenous communities’ scientific contributions and perspectives, countering imperialist narratives that too often elevate white colonizers’ discoveries over those who have lived on the land and traveled the surrounding oceans for thousands of years.

Cartwright notes that when there is opportunity for sustained collaboration—across art and science or between scientists and communities impacted by scientific research—the results can be transformative.

“Rather than studying the ways that art borrows from science or science borrows from art,” says Cartwright, “I’m interested in really investigating the ways that art and science intertwine.”