Brainy Days
The Art of Neuroscience, online and IRL
In late October, as many people turn to thoughts of pumpkins, witches and ghosts, a small band of artists thinks exclusively of brains. Not because we are zombies, although some of us may be staying up a little too late painting and stitching. It’s because the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), one of the world’s largest gatherings of scientists, falls around this time every year. Tens of thousands attend, and those neuroscientists are hungry for brain art.
For over a decade, SfN has featured The Art of Neuroscience, a space devoted to artists inspired by the wonders of the brain. This year’s meeting, to be held November 11-15 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, will showcase 12 neuro artists - the most ever - with works ranging from embroidery and painting to ceramics and fine metalwork.
During the pandemic, as these huge meetings shut down or went virtual, the artists of SfN were left without an audience. In the fall of 2020, a group of us, led by fiber artist Laura Bundesen, took the brain art show online, creating the Virtual Art of Neuroscience event, which continues to this day.
The 2023 online event, which will run from October 22-25, is a free-form, social-media driven celebration of sciart. The virtual version, which can encompass a much larger group of both artists and scientists than the IRL event, consists largely of two internet indispensibles – a hashtag and a discount code. The artists and our supporters share our artwork posts with the hashtag #VirtualArtofNeuro on social media sites including Instagram, Mastodon, Facebook, LinkedIn and Bluesky. If you come across these posts as you scroll, please share them to spread the word. (The main locus of the event used to be Twitter, but…. sigh) Many of the artists who sell online also offer a discount during the event. I’ll be offering 15% off everything in my Etsy shop from October 22-25 with the code VirtualArtofNeuro
I’ll also be exhibiting at the IRL meeting next month, so I have been busy painting many, many brains and brain cells in watercolor and ink. Some of the new pieces I’ll be debuting at SfN this year are inspired by the work of the pioneering neuroscientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These watercolors pay tribute to the contributions made by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Camillo Golgi, and others, while glancing back to a time when the line between scientist and artist was much fuzzier than it is now.
I’ve also been working on some ink paintings about memory with overlays of neuron and brain images, as I described in my first substack post. I’ll leave you with this one, which combines free-flowing ink with neuron images by Golgi and a quote from Russian novelist Eugene Vodolazkin that beautifully evokes the wonder of the human mind:
I keep thinking about the nature of recollections. Can it really be that what my memory stores is only a combination of neurons in my head? The smell of a Christmas tree, the glassy ringing of garlands in a draft of air, is that neurons? Paper strips crackling on a window frame when it is opened in April and the apartment fills with spring air. The evening clicking of heels along the sidewalk, the drone of nocturnal insects in the dome of a lamp. And Anastasia’s and my timid feelings, which I remember gratefully and will remember until the end of my life – are those neurons, too?
Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator
Thank you for reading! If you enjoy my writing, please like and share this post. If you enjoy my artwork, you can purchase it here. If you’re in the DC area, you can find a listing of my upcoming art events here.
One last thing: I would like to express my gratitude to the Society for Neuroscience for hosting artists at their meetings, and to the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for awarding me an Arts and Humanities Fellowship Program Grant for 2024. Thank you for your support. It means so much.