Metronome: 45" diameter, Acrylic on maple panel
Tiffany Bozic, 2007
Photo credit: ©Jack Dumbacher, 2007
For 154 years, The California Academy of Sciences has explored the world, gathering over 20 million specimens that are housed in the museum's collections. The new California Academy of Sciences Artist in Residence (AiR) program is pioneering a new way of interpreting these specimens, and its work will be unveiled for the first time to the public on November 15, 2007.
The research division of the Academy, although largely unseen, has driven the mission and public face of the Natural History Museum since its inception. Collections from the departments in this arm of the museum, along with collections from the Academy's library and archives, will serve as the focus of the residency. The Natural History Museum contains eight departments that are organized by taxonomic discipline: Anthropology, Aquatic Biology, Botany, Entomology, Herpetology, Ichthyology, Invertebrate Zoology & Geology, and Ornithology & Mammalogy.
For the AiR program, the artist will explore the collections with an assigned mentor from a selected department, culminating in a final exhibit and associated programming. The hope is to blur the lines between the arts and sciences. Through partnership and collaboration, artists from multiple disciplines will be challenged to experience and interpret the collections in new and meaningful ways. By creating space for artists to inspire dialogue about the issues facing the Earth and the sciences today the AiR program is creating another way for the Academy to further its mission to explain, explore, and protect the natural world.
The pilot AiR program opens on November 15, 2007. Its first exhibit, From the Depths: Inspiring Art and Science, has been a year in the making. It is a contemporary art exhibit created from the collaboration between Oakland based artist Tiffany Bozic and Dr. Rich Mooi, curator of Invertebrate Zoology & Geology.