Illustration by Molly Keller. Courtesy of Liz Broughton.

The two different fields of art and science come together through a process called science illustration. Science illustration combines both by giving artists a chance to teach others about science through their artwork. This may involve drawing rare specimens, designing maps displaying the distribution of species, developing 3-D models and more. The Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History (SCMNH) allows artists to teach their work as science illustrators through “The Art of Nature.”

The 24th annual series of “The Art of Nature” is coming back to SCMNH on April 6. The program, originally called “Illustrating Nature,” used to display work from the graduating classes of UC Santa Cruz’s science illustration program before it moved to CSU Monterey Bay. Now it displays artwork from the California Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI), a nonprofit organization of people who are employed or interested in the field of natural science illustration. The guild provides professional and scholarly development and holds events that teach the public about the field.

Liz Broughton, the museum’s visitor services manager, said “The Art of Nature” is one of the most popular exhibits every year.

“Scientific illustration is really a great marriage of both science and the arts,” she said, “It’s really a way of conveying scientific information through images. It’s an important tool to scientists because it can sometimes show details that aren’t readily visible in a photograph per se, or it can bring to life the skeletal anatomy that you can’t see from looking at an animal. It can bring to life things that don’t exist anymore, that are extinct.”

The exhibit will provide information on the tools and techniques used to create the artwork, hands-on stations where visitors themselves can create museum specimens, and stations where visitors can classify the different museum specimens. These activities will be among over 40 pieces of artwork from about 20 different artists until June 9.

One of these artists is Sondra Cohelan, a UCSC alumna and graduate of the science communication program. Cohelan has sent in work to SCNHM’s annual exhibit since 1999, and her interest in science illustration stemmed when she first attended the exhibit.

“I graduated from UCSC with a major in art and I really loved going to exhibits,” she said, “I learned about the exhibit of natural science illustration at SCNHM and went over and saw the amazing work which was produced and just fell in love with it.”

This year Cohelan sent in three pieces of art, one being a recreation of a Towhee nest, called “A Garden Gift.”

“One of the ladies I draw with found a nest in the yard and it was a beautiful nest,” she said, “It had a beautiful feather coming out of it’s side on the top and I thought, ‘Wow, I wonder if I can put that down on paper and make it look real.’ So it was a challenge to produce.”

Cissy Freeman, a Santa Cruz resident and freelance artist, found the nest for Cohelan’s “A Garden Gift” piece. Freeman has been involved with the GNSI since 1995 and has three California native plant pieces in the exhibit.

“I like doing California natives because it fits with my concern about the natural environment and preserving native plants,” Freeman said.

One of the native plants Freeman worked with was coffeeberry. She clipped branches of coffeeberry, drew preliminary drawings from different angles, put together the parts she liked and transferred the drawing to a watercolor painting.

While Freeman said her artwork is more traditional, there will be other pieces at the exhibit that are computer generated. Freeman said visitors will see a whole range of the way artists work in the field.

“What everything will have in common is a concern with detail, combining accuracy with aesthetics, and producing something beautiful,” she said.

“The Art of Nature” will be open April 6 – June 9. Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m to 5 p.m. Admission is $2 for students, $4 for the general public, and free for those under 18.

Photo by Daniela Ruiz

History lies at the base of UC Santa Cruz in a crumbling, decaying form. Unusable since 2006, the Cowell Lime Works Hay Barn demonstrates what campus was like before the school was founded.

The barn, which was built on the UCSC campus about a century before the school began, had an important role in the manufacturing of lime and limestone products in California. The barn housed oxen that hauled these products to the wharf for shipment. After being purchased by Henry Cowell, the barn became part of his local business named Cowell Lime Works.

The barn is being preserved by the Friends of the Cowell Lime Works Historic District. This group is planning to renovate the barn and transform it into a modern building available for campus use.

According to the group’s website, the organization “works to restore and preserve the old lime kilns and historic buildings of the Cowell Lime Works Historic District.” The group’s president Frank Perry attributes the barn’s steady deterioration to years of weather damage. “It’s no longer in use because it’s in too bad of a condition and it’s not safe to go in,” Perry said. “After periods of storm damage, the barn became unsafe.”

A fight for the restoration of the barn has been going on for the past few years through many proposed project ideas.

“For one reason or another, [the ideas for restoration] just didn’t work out and finally about a year ago, there were some people who had a serious interest in saving the barn,” Perry said. “It’s possible now that it will be in fact fixed up and put to use by the campus. It’s just a matter of finding the funding and so that’s what a number of people are working on right now.”

Dean Fitch, who is in charge of physical environment planning at UCSC, said the barn’s feasibility study is in its final review stage. The planned reconstruction will maintain the original heavy timber frames while also meeting current building codes. The complete design and environmental analysis of the rehabilitated barn project still needs to be defined, which may take about a year.

The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) became involved with the project about a year ago when the museum got in touch with the Friends of the Cowell Lime Works Historic District. The museum’s “Barn Raising” exhibition, which will be open until March 17, focuses on the future of the Cowell Lime Works Hay Barn.

“Since we are both an art and history museum, we’re all about investigating the history of Santa Cruz,” said the curator of “Barn Raising,” Marla Novo. “So we thought it would be great to turn [the barn’s restoration] into an exhibition.”

The exhibition consists of different pieces of art and historical artifacts that are related to the barn’s history, such as photography of the barn throughout its years, various belongings of workers who were involved on the barn’s site, timber framing tools and a hay fork trolley. The exhibition’s main attraction is an interactive model of the hay barn under construction, which can be taken apart and put back together by visitors.

“It’s really fun when we have volunteers actually pound out the pegs and put the hay barn together,” Novo said.

Novo said the exhibition is a chance for students to learn some history about their home away from home. “We thought it would be wonderful to show our community something like timber framing and have an exhibit that uses interactivity so people can come and actually find out a little bit about the Cowell Lime District up at UCSC,” Novo said.

Daniel Press, a UCSC professor of environmental studies, said he predicts the newly reconstructed barn will be used for numerous projects like storing fruits and vegetables for the on-campus Community Supported Agriculture program, as well as holding classroom workshops, office space and exhibits.

“My goal and hope is that people would be fighting for space in the barn,” he said. “It would be that busy.”

Although the Huichol Foundation is in its incipient stages, its ambitions are large. The organization centers on preserving the economic, cultural and environmental facets of the Huichol way of life. For one thing, the foundation will subsidize materials, such as yarn and beads that the Huichol use when creating art, in order to ensure their artistic legacy.

Brant Secunda, who heads the Dance of the Deer Foundation helped establish the Huichol foundation after being immersed in Huichol culture.

After travelling around North America in the mid-1960s, Brant Secunda found himself in Huichol territory without food or water. After becoming unconscious, he awoke in the care of the Huichol people. They helped him and soon he began an apprenticeship with a Huichol shaman.

This engagement with the Huichol culture and practices led to Brant’s establishment of the Dance of the Deer Foundation, which supported the Huichol and helped to market their art.

Brant included his son in his endeavor. Nico Secunda is the current chief financial officer of the Huichol Foundation.

“I’ve been a part of the Huichol culture my whole life,” Secunda said. “I grew up going to Huichol villages and I went all over the world to teach their ways with my father.”

Now, Secunda wants to further the prospects his father worked for. While Dance of the Deer supported 600 Huichol people in three villages, there are 30,000 Huichol people total. Secunda hopes the Huichol Foundation will reach out to the many other Huichol people and begin to form lasting bonds throughout the entire community.

“If you look at diversity in food, cultures and languages,” Secunda said, “we know somewhere in our hearts that it is [important], and that we need to preserve it.”

The launch party will feature: Brant and Nico Secunda, Hawaii Ironman world champion Mark Allen, former senior global vice president of Whole Foods Market Michael Besancon and the NASA Ames Deputy Director of Education and Outreach Darlene Gross.

The event begins at 6:30 p.m. Adult tickets are $20. Student tickets online are $10, but at the door will be $15. All donations will go toward the Huichol Foundation.

Rose Sellery guides viewers through her exhibit, titled “Passages,” which focuses on the horrors of relationship abuse. Photo by Sal Ingram

A slipper pieced together by shards of glass, a bloody maternity dress hanging on a mannequin, and the shouts of an abusive husband playing in the background. These are only a few of the details highlighted in Rose Sellery’s exhibition, “Passages,” featured at the Museum of Art and History (MAH) for their Free First Friday on the evening of Oct. 5.

Free First Friday is every first Friday of the month, and this month the MAH organized the event with the Resource Center for Nonviolence’s Project Regeneration. Sellery’s exhibition was one of many contributions to the event that evening.

“Passages” tells the story about a girl, Lucille, who grows up with the dream of a man whisking her away into the perfect marriage and the Cinderella-like fairytales that she longs for.

Sellery guided the audience through the room as she narrated the story and displayed articles that represented different aspects of the abusive relationships that many people go through.

“It generally takes seven attempts to leave,” Sellery said. “Not seven beatings, but seven attempts to leave. This is not my story, but it is a lot of people’s story.”

Her idea for the exhibition came from a video she was making about relationship abuse.

“I created a story based off of that,” Sellery said. “How did [Lucille] start off that led her here? Where does she end up when she leaves? And how does this story end?”

Santa Cruz’s MAH held their monthly Free First Friday with several different exhibitions and activities surrounding around topics of nonviolence and conflict, including “Passages,” interactive art, the Pop Up Museum and live music.

Project Regeneration, which aims toward increasing art and activism in youth, hosted the interactive art activities that displayed nonviolence, such as making peace flags, partaking in a post-it note mural, and discussing issues around violence.

Irene O’Connell, an intern at the Resource Center for Nonviolence and UC Santa Cruz alumna, works with Project Regeneration to find empowerment for the youth through the arts. She talked about the importance of having a political and personal voice.

“We were realizing that there wasn’t enough youth participation in local politics,” she said. “Essentially what it is seeking to do is build a community collected of youth that’s finding empowerment through the arts, music, poetry, do it yourself activities and the creative processes.”

Project Regeneration has other events for the community to attend, such as an open mic every last friday of the month at the Resource Center for Nonviolence. The community can also attend trainings in nonviolence, four two-hour sessions where participants can learn about how the individual reacts to violence, look at different types of violence, and strategize how to take on issues nonviolently.

O’Connell hopes Free First Friday will allow people to learn more about Project Regeneration and the Resource Center for Nonviolence.

“It’s a great chance for the resource center to present ourselves to the public and maybe to a population we don’t normally get to connect with, so it’s exciting,” she said.

The MAH also created the Pop Up Museum, displaying objects interns and community members brought in that fell into the category of “Objects of Conflict.”

Nora Grant, the Pop Up Museum Coordinator, said it was interesting that normal, everyday objects can be a piece that stands for conflict.

“There was diversity of the objects that people brought. Some of them were pretty ordinary,” she said. “One guy brought a bottle of water and he started to talk about water shortage and conservation and desalination. You realize this object becomes a symbol for a bigger conversation.”

The Pop Up Museum, which will be a continuing event at the MAH, is going to create new topics that will keep allowing the community to express themselves by the objects they bring and display.

“I think it’s wonderful you can get these fascinating stories from really common objects and that the pop-up museum allows anybody to participate in this kind of event,” Grant said. “It’s really unique because we all have neat stuff but we don’t get to show them in a museum.”

For more information, you can visit the MAH’s website at http://www.santacruzmah.org/ and the Resource Center for Nonviolence’s website at http://rcnv.org/. 

The live launch party for Phren-Z, a new literary zine, was held at the Museum of Art and History on March 2. Photo by Marielena Verdugo.

No two writers were alike in content or form, yet they all shared one trait: They engaged both ethos and pathos.

This rang true to the name of the publication that brought them together this past First Friday — Phren-Z (pronounced “frenzy”). The Greek root “phren” refers to the heart and mind, and the Z stands for zine, short for magazine. Unlike what some might cynically expect of a zine, Phren-Z brings together established local writers for a polished professional publication.

Phren-Z’s live launch party at the Museum of Art and History (MAH) in downtown Santa Cruz was an emotional and intellectual experience that showcased a selection of works from the zine’s flagship issue, which launched this past Valentine’s Day.

The event began promptly at 5 p.m. at the MAH, where a predominantly older crowd packed the room. Guests trickling in late found there was only standing room in the crowd of around 70.

Through publishing work by Santa Cruz writers, the grassroots organization Phren-Z helps to enhance writing opportunities for local established and emerging artists.

Writers read their own work during the event. Their content ranged from poetry about angels, to fiction novels about love, to memoirs about first love, to essays about why they write.

The room was filled with laughter as Wallace Baine, an arts and entertainment writer from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, read his laundry list essay, “Why I Write.” The humorous and cynical yet extremely truthful essay began, “I write because painting involves clean-up … I write because sculptors always have bruised and cut-up hands, and stand-up comics rarely get to bed before 3 a.m.” He finished by sentimentally saying “writing is the only truly private art.”

Although Baine pokes fun at writing as a career, in the end it is what he and the other writers of the evening all have in common — a passion for writing.

Karen Tei Yamashita, a current UC Santa Cruz professor of literature and creative writing, read an excerpt from her novel “I-Hotel,” a National Book Award finalist. Poised and eloquent, Yamashita provided the audience with a glimpse into the struggle of the civil rights movement in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

The night ended on a heartfelt note by honoring recently deceased Santa Cruz writer Morton Marcus. His wife, Donna Mekis, read some of her favorite pieces Marcus wrote before he died. Phren-Z did a special “floodlight feature,” which illuminates an event, person or interest of the local literary community. Phren-Z gave away free copies of Marcus’ memoir, “Striking Through the Mask,” provided by the Capitola Book Company and Ow Family Properties.

Attending the Phren-Z event not only reaffirmed my passion for writing, but inspired me to continue to write and to never feel that writing is a lost art you can’t make a career out of. Phren-Z creates a support system for the local writing community. The frequent updates on their website will inspire you to get out your pen and paper and write down your thoughts.

Courtesy photo.

When you walk into an art exhibit, you probably don’t expect to go surfing.

But this is the case at “DANM Artists Take Over the Museum of Art and History.”

A virtual surfboard experience constructed by Daniel Christopher, Lyes Belhocine and Drew Detweiler illustrates the endless possibilities offered through the fusion of technology and art. This fusion is the focus of UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) exhibit which opens tomorow.

The show features a variety of interactive technology and art by current and former DANM students. Mobile technology, interactive designs and web-based applications are just a few of the modes utilized to create interactive works. Not only does the exhibit offer a hands-on experience, it also explores the idea of seeing technology as art.

DANM’s exhibit opening will be a one-night affair at the Museum of Art and History (MAH) in downtown Santa Cruz on Friday from 5–9 p.m. A collage animation workshop will be held from 6–8 p.m., along with a guerilla grafting demonstration at 6 and 8 p.m.

DANM students have displayed work at MAH before, and it has since become a prime place for them to showcase student art.

“Artists want to show their work, and they want to show it in the best place possible,” said Felicia Rice, DANM program manager. “These students and alumni all have experience, so this is wonderful that they took the initiative to plan the event.”

“There are a lot of digital artists in the area working, so we were able to bring the alumni and current students together. It’s also a great way to reach out to the larger Santa Cruz,” said Drew Detweiler, a UCSC DANM research associate and 2010 graduate of the DANM program.

“It’s all interactive and hands-on,” Detweiler said. “It’s not like looking at art on a wall. You can pick up the objects, touch them … it’s a very participatory experience. I think people will be excited by the variety of work, from web-based applications to VJ tech to participatory activities. People will see things they wouldn’t be able to see otherwise.”

Although the exhibit explores the boundaries of technology and art, the pieces displayed are centered around themes different people can relate to, like music, skateboarding and animation. This means that the exhibit attracts an eclectic crowd, bringing people together to experience art through the eyes of digital artists.

“When you hear the word ‘digital,’ it brings up a lot of different ideas,” Rice said. “What you will learn is that the field is very broad. DANM is a wealth of possibilities for applying technology and rethinking how these tools are used in an art context.”

Photo by Olivia Irvin.

Along with its permanent rooftop sculpture exhibit and other modern art pieces, the Museum of Art and History (MAH) at the McPherson Center is currently offering a space for UC Santa Cruz students to display their work in an upcoming presentation by the Digital Arts and New Media Master of Fine Arts degree program (DANM MFA). 

DANM will present the work of 10 graduate students in a two-part exhibition. The first part, called “interACTIVE,” runs through June 24, while the second, called “interACTIVATE,” will open May 29.

“We were lucky to be invited to show the work of our DANM graduates at the MAH,” said Felicia Rice, media representative for the DANM project. “This is our fourth graduating cohort, and we have previously shown at the Digital Media Factory on the Westside and … a huge digital arts festival in downtown San Jose.”

The pieces are created with digital and new media technologies, creating new sights for museum visitors not familiar with art media.

Nada Miljkovic, who is completing her final quarter in the two-year DANM master’s program, will have work showing in both parts of the interactive exhibition. For interACTIVE, she will be presenting a Balkan folk song about the emotion and pain of arranged marriages in the style of sevdah, a traditional Bosnian musical form.

“Coming from the Balkans, my own family is full of forced marriages,” said Miljkovic, who was born in the former Yugoslavia. “I chose to do this piece in hopes that through the experience of the endurance piece some liberation may occur both for myself and the participating audience.”

For interACTIVATE, Miljkovic produced a short film on forced marriage — “Eva on Marriage” — that she also submitted to the Santa Cruz Film Festival at the Del Mar Theatre.

“It’s a real honor to bring this very specific music tradition, that some may categorize as folk music, into a institution of high art,” Miljkovic said. “My aim is to educate and entertain.”

Providing UCSC and Cabrillo artists a venue to display their work has allowed the MAH to promote art in the community. The museum currently holds the one-of-a-kind artwork of various regional, local and college artists from Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, as well as the greater Bay Area. 

One of the current exhibits is showcasing the work of Bay Area artist Jerry Ross Barrish, whose medium of choice is reconfigured and recycled plastic sculptures.

The MAH is doing well despite financial troubles statewide. Membership fees and donations by visitors fund exhibits and new attractions, which in turn draw more total visitors.

“We’re aware that people are struggling in the community,” said Theresa Myers, the public relations and marketing manager of MAH.

Myers said that she does not anticipate an increase in the price of admission in the near future.

The MAH, which does not receive money from the state or county, receives funding solely from community-based grants. The majority of the museum’s funding comes from membership fees and the annual Stars fundraiser gala and auction. The auction, held every year in December at the museum, sells work donated by local artists. 

The MAH museum holds permanent and touring exhibits of regional artists, along with the rooftop sculpture exhibit. Many of the exhibits are composed of contemporary artworks and historical pieces owned by the museum. Throughout the museum’s three stories and rooftop, dresses constructed of Bubblicious gum wrappers are displayed next to old photographs of Santa Cruz residents at the wharf.

“By offering a place to hold the various artifacts,” Myers said, “the community is still able to interact.”