Brain- the most colourful art

Science exhibition has always been an inspiration for scientists to aspire new things, a recent editorial in April states about the brain awareness week held from March 15th – 21st 2021 at the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai New York, NY, USA.

The exhibition invited its faculty, postdoctoral researchers, students, and staff to contribute to their Art of the Brain exhibition. The number of submissions to this annual event (now in its eighth year) had increased year on year; with two dozen entries for the inaugural event in 2014, for the exhibition in 2021 (March 16–May 28) more than 70 pieces of mixed media including drawings, paintings, videos, and sculptures were submitted. The only criterion for Art of the Brain was that the art must relate to the brain or nervous system.

Photographer and curator Veronica Szarejko was put in incharge of job to select, arrange, and hang the works, because of restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, for the 2021 exhibition she had to move her gallery into a 3D virtual space. Szarejko says she faced the challenge of bringing the sensory rendition to an online platform. The curator stated that "I wanted to create an art space that a person could 'walk' through as one would tour a gallery. I wanted the exhibition to be interactive, to elevate the viewer's experience." This was her first ever virtual platform, "The best science has a story and, through the Art of the Brain, we are able to represent that story in a brand new way", says Szarejko.

The Editorial talks about Danny Roldan's Kodoma art work which was a brush and ink rendition of neuron which was visually stunning, like a garden underwater. Miss Your Face by Long Li used in-vivo gene delivery and confocal imaging on real brain slices, then computer software to heighten pseudocolour and crystallisation, producing a six-panel replication evocative of the pop-art genre, similar to Pop Brain by An-Li Wang and Chris Kudrich was a reward system activated in the brain in nine vibrant colour images. Pandora world of the brain was a sensory treat, the artist-scientist Zhuhao Wu used vibrant colours to show the different biochemical properties of the brain an effort for an appreciation of the "intricacy and complexity" of this remarkable organ. There were paintings resembling to the natural world highlighted in the exhibition, and many more mesmorizing paintings. 

The editorial concluded "Art of the Brain captures the essence of understanding the eulogistic relationship between science and art, blurring the distinction that historically viewed them as polarised disciplines." Researcher and exhibitor Jose Javier Bravo-Cordero commented, "the human body is a piece of art itself, so it's hard for us microscopists, that look to cells and tissue every day, not to look at every image as a little piece of art.

For further information: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(21)00134-4.