Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet

This fall, Caltech is home to a new exhibit called Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020. Part of Getty's event, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Crossing Over is a campuswide public exhibition presented by Caltech Library that opens on September 27 and runs through December 15.

Take a look at some of the featured items from this exhibition. Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020 is free, self-guided, and open to the public. Visiting hours for the indoor galleries are Wednesdays–Sundays, 11 a.m.– 4 p.m.

Shana Mabari’s Spectrum Petals consists of seven mirrored cylinders of varying sizes that echo astronomical instruments and the narrow band of visible light on the electromagnetic spectrum. Hard-edged and luminous, Mabari’s sculptures sprout on Bechtel Mall like alien blossoms. (Photograph by Eric Minh Swenson)

Architect Russell Porter created spectacular renderings of the 200-inch Palomar Observatory telescope well before it was completed in 1948. Here, a decade earlier, he captures the telescope in a meridian cross-section, showing it from two angles with varying degrees of transparency to indicate the instrument’s intended movements. A tubular section near the top of the telescope shows an astronomer perched atop the telescope’s prime focus.

This is Caltech’s first-edition copy of De revolutionibus, the 1543 book in which Copernicus argued that Earth and other planets orbited the Sun, rather than, as most believed, the Sun and the planets orbited Earth.

Lita Albuquerque’s installation, This Moment in Time, commemorates the first exhibition of her work at Caltech’s Baxter Art Gallery in 1974. Her use of artificial gold leaf refers to the origin of gold and other elements within stars, a process theorized by Caltech physicist William Fowler and his collaborators in 1957. This finding later prompted astronomer Carl Sagan to exclaim that “we are made of star stuff.” (Photograph by Chris Hanke)

In You, Me, and Infinity, Lia Halloran, a recent Caltech artist in residence and collaborator of Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, traverses eight levels of scale, from quantum-scale vacuum fluctuations to her children, Atlas and Jasper, to the Small Magellanic Cloud, the Andromeda Galaxy, and gravitational waves. (Photograph by Joshua White)

Biologist and illustrator Edith Wallace began working for early Caltech faculty member Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1908, when he conducted his Nobel Prize-winning research on the genetics of the fruit fly. This fly is a gynandromorph, an organism in which some parts have male traits and others female, hence its asymmetrical eyes, wings, and abdomen.

This 1965 pastel drawing is the first image of another planet from the perspective of a spacecraft. When Richard Grumm and other Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers received a transmission from Mariner 4 with the signal from its video camera encoded as numbers, they printed out the numbers and colored them in.

In 1971, Helen Pashgian exhibited her first resin-based lenses at Caltech’s Baxter Art Gallery. Pashgian’s radiant lens of 2023, displayed in a temporary pavilion at Caltech’s Chen Neuroscience Research Building, reflects her long-standing interest in the effects and perception of light. (Photograph by Jeff McLane)

Contemporary LA art and rare books from the Scientific Revolution come together in Caltech’s Gates Annex Library as part of the exhibition Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020. Art by Vija Celmins, Helen Pashgian, Bruce Conner, and Jane Brucker. (Photograph by Joshua White)

Contemporary LA art, science fiction, and the history of scientific images come together in Caltech’s Dabney Lounge as part of the exhibition Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020. Art by Christopher O’Leary. (Photograph by Joshua White)