Caltech’s Century Of Art And Science Colliding

Before PST ART bids a fond farewell: More Art Shows of Note from 2024: CAL TECH

One of the most interesting and surprising PST Art and Science Collide exhibits was not at a museum or gallery, it was Cal Tech’s, Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech 1920-2020 which ran from September 27-December 15, 2024, and featured artworks by Los Angeles artists Shana Maberi, Jane Drucker, Lita Albuquerque, and Helen Pashgian, among others.

Here’s what Caltech said of the exhibition on its website: “In 1912, Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan, the founding chairman of Caltech’s Division of Biology, and technician Eleth Cattell coined the phrase “crossing over” to refer to twists or breaks in chromosomes that combine genes from each to produce offspring different from both parents. It serves as a potent metaphor for the complex interchange between science and the visual arts at this influential institution—in a process that has been both fertile and fraught with difficulty.” Got that? If not, don’t worry. It helps to be a Nobel Prize winner to be at Cal Tech.

What was great about the exhibition was that it sent you on a campus-wide treasure hunt, with three exhibitions housed at different places around the campus.

Caltech’s campus is small, and quite attractive with a mix of old buildings, buildings from the 1960s, and modern buildings of recent vintage. Given that the school is located in Pasadena, California where the climate is mild most of the year, there are plenty of outdoor spaces with tables and chairs for students and faculty to congregate. And given that it is Caltech, many outdoor seating areas, had a white board affixed to an outside wall, often crowded with equations – which was very cool.

Crossing Over consisted of several installations. The first, The Infinite Lawn and Spectrum Petals, greeted us upon arrival at Caltech’s historic Bechtel Mall (the quad-like space around which the campus was originally organized).

The Spectrum Petals are seven artworks by Shana Maberi, who has been collaborating with Caltech for over two decades, installed along the lawn. Each of the circular discs is a different color and seems to stand, or float, at its given location. They are works that focus the viewer, and trigger contemplation even as they appear as perfect forms that betray no evidence of human manufacture. They interact with the available sunlight and bring to mind the work of California Light and Space artists of the 1970s. The works also call to mind ancient scientific astronomical instruments, while the series of colors are representative of, the press release notes, “the narrow band of light on the electromagnetic spectrum.”

This exhibition then moves inside to the Linde Laboratory for Global Environmental Science, which was completed in 1932. Inside a room there is a small solar telescope there that projects a live image of the sun. Off to the side, there’s a small classroom that looked it was from the 1930s, and where one could easily imagine Einstein working (Einstein was at Caltech for three winter terms in 1931, 1932, and 1933).

The magical art tour at Caltech next led us to the Gates Annex, a building that seems modern in comparison but that to today’s eyes is dated to a style favored in the 1960s—a tall white tower. Artist Jane Brucker had installed a display in the building’s small library, Time Stream which considers the power in the attraction of opposites. In front of the Gates Annex, Lita Albuquerque, who exhibited at Caltech’s Baxter Gallery in 1974, installed This Moment in Time, a sparkly gold span or bridge across the building’s reflecting pool outside. It made me think of the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz, but actually. the website informed me, “the gold refers to the creation of the precious metal and other chemical elements through nuclear fusion reactors within stars – a process theoretically and experimentally studied in landmark research by Caltech physicist William A. Fowler and his colleagues in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Over in the historic Dabney Lounge, there was a fascinating and unexpected exhibition that explored Caltech’s use of imagery for scientific purposes, such as seismology, particle physics and planetary science, as well as a particular role Caltech played in the US military’s Manhattan Project that produced the first Atomic Bombs. Declassified photos of the mushroom cloud, and photo paper exposed to nuclear radiation as well as other artifacts made for a unique exhibit, one I won’t soon forget.

Finally, for the last exhibition, I went over to the very modern cutting edge Chen Neuroscience Research Building, where there was an installation of a work by Helen Pashgian, a Pasadena-based Light and Space artist who was the only woman artist invited to be part of Caltech’s newly adopted artist-in-residence program in 1969. The installation features one of Pashgian’s radiant lenses from 2023, works that change as you look at it – not because the artwork changes, it doesn’t—but because of how the brain perceives light.

Art and Science have collided at Caltech for more than a century, but it took PST Art to celebrate its genius at doing so.