science and art – Art Spiel

September 7, 2026September 7, 2026, by Nicole Michaud

Rebecca Rutstein: Universal Nature at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art

In Universal Nature, at Ursinus College’s Berman Museum, you can easily feel the breadth of Rebecca Rutstein’s long artistic practice. Rutstein has spent over two decades creating paintings, sculptures, videos, and textiles, buoyed by a passion to connect with and understand complex global systems that are core to our existence on this planet. Universal Nature presents a mid-career survey spanning her oeuvre, with an intellectual focus on continuous change, transformation, and interdependence.

July 20, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Timothy Makepeace: From Thirty Feet to One Million Miles

Timothy Makepeace has spent nine years making art about one of the most complex machines humanity has ever built. Since his first visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2016, the artist has developed an expansive body of work in response to the James Webb Space Telescope — its gold-plated beryllium mirrors, its acoustic test chambers, the light it gathers from increasingly distant points in time. The culmination of that inquiry is Ghost in the Machine, on view at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, through August 9, 2026. We spoke with Makepeace about working with NASA engineers, the formal decisions behind his square-format drawings, and what kept drawing him back to a telescope now orbiting the Sun a million miles from Earth.

June 3, 2026June 13, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Maria Gil Lucientes: Letting the Materials Misbehave

Maria Gil Lucientes, Circles series backdrop

Maria Gil Lucientes paints in the slim margin where a system starts to come undone. She begins with a constraint, a single color, a periodic screen, a piece of medical gauze, then lets the materials misbehave. In Pareidolia, gauze shifted by air becomes the suggestion of a face. A Spanish-born painter who studied mathematics, physics, and computer science before a decade in tech, Lucientes brings a system-builder’s discipline to a practice that hinges on chance. Here, she reflects on the path from science to painting, the dialogue between control and surprise in her process, and the new Moiré series taking shape in her studio.

November 14, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Ballad of Spread – Michal Gavish at Delaware Contemporary

Art Spiel Photo Story

A room with art on the walls

Description automatically generated with low confidence — Exponential Bloom, 2021

During the past year of the pandemic, Michal Gavish used her background as a scientist to research and draw on the sub-microscopic struggle between viruses and our body. Throughout this year of isolation, she became absorbed with the science and imagery of these biological attackers facing body defenders, the antigens against the antibodies. Imagining each virus from its initial exponential expansion to its final abrupt elimination, she sketches and experiments with color-field displays generated by genetic research. Her visual search incorporates mixed media in which she adopts the color-coded language of molecular modeling that she has learned as a chemist.

July 28, 2021July 6, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Common Frequencies / Frecuencias Comunes at BioBat Art Space

In Dialogue with Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

Elisa Gutiérrez in conversation with Miguel Gleason, Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute in NY, at the opening of Common Frequencies. Background video shows Marcela Armas’ video piece “Tsinamekuta”. Image: @onwhitewall

Common Frequencies brings together a group of Mexican artists whose work explore the intersection of art and science through sound, urban ecology, language, and collective imageries through performance, installation, photography, sound, and drawing. The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of free bilingual educational programs that encourage the participation of families. The exhibition runs through October 16^th. 2021.