UND and Red River High School have joined forces to show just how easily science and art can fuse together.
Nuri Oncel, an associate professor of physics and astrophysics at UND, noticed while using a scanning tunneling microscope that the atoms and molecules he was viewing looked “very nice.”
Oncel thought about how someone with artistic vision might see the images and if that connection could be used to help educate young artists about science.
Betsy Thaden, an art teacher at Red River High School, thought so, too. Six years ago, the two educators started NanoArt: Hidden Landscapes. Oncel teaches Thaden’s high school class about atoms and molecules and shares images from his microscope that the students then use to paint their own artistic interpretations of the data.
Many of the students were using the same images for their work, but every piece in the gallery is unique.
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“Some of them will be very abstract,” Oncel said. “Some of them are really very correlated with the images we provide them.”
The exhibit has been hosted for the past three years at the Empire Arts Center. This year some UND departments joined in.
The integrated studies program, along with a humanities course, produced several pieces of their own, which assistant professor Rebecca Leber-Gottberg said couldn’t have been more perfect for the curriculum.
“We have such a hard time, I think, finding opportunities for art and science to talk to each other,” Gottberg said, “And this was a really nice way to do that.”
The show will run 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday and will be taken down after 2 p.m. Friday.
