Jeff Lichtman, Joshua Sanes, and Jean Livet, Brainbow, 2007.
After debuting at the Weisman Art Museum, The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal exhibition traveled to university art museums in the U.S. and Canada. See below for the full traveling schedule.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, considered the father of modern neuroscience, was also an exceptional artist. He drew the brain in a way that provided a clarity exceeding that achieved by photographs. Combining scientific and artistic skills to produce drawings with extraordinary scientific and aesthetic qualities, his theory that the brain is composed of individual cells rather than a tangled single web is the basis of neuroscience today. This traveling exhibition of Cajal’s original drawings was organized by the Weisman Art Museum in collaboration with Drs. Eric Newman, Alfonso Araque, and Janet Dubinsky, neuroscientists at the University of Minnesota and leaders in the field of neuroscience. Dr. Araque was formerly at the Instituto Cajal in Madrid, where Cajal worked and where his drawings are housed.
The exhibit is organized in collaboration with Ricardo Martinez Murillo, neuroscientist and curator of the Cajal Legacy at the Cajal Institute (CSIC) in Spain. Eighty of Cajal’s drawings, many appearing for the first time in the United States, will be accompanied by a selection of contemporary visualizations of the brain, photographs, historic books, and scientific tools. After the debut at WAM, the exhibition will travel to university galleries and museums throughout the United States and Canada.
THE BOOK ABRAMS has published a book to accompany the exhibition.The book is available for purchase in the WAM Shop. The book contains full color reproductions of all eighty of the exhibition drawings, commentary on each of the drawings, and essays on Cajal’s life and scientific contributions, his artistic root and achievements, and contemporary neuroscience imaging techniques.
The Beautiful Brain Tour Schedule January 28 – May 21, 2017 | Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota Minneapolis MN September 5 – December 3, 2017 | Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery,
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada January 9 – March 31, 2018 | Grey Art Gallery, New York University New York City, New York, USA May 2, 2018 – December 31, 2018 | MIT Museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA January 27 – April 7, 2019 | Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Support from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Public Understanding of Science, Technology and Economics program allows WAM, in partnership with The Cajal Institute and the four partner university museums, to build bridges between science and the humanities by distributing books free of charge to university libraries and students and teachers in local high-schools.
Top image: Santiago Ramón y Cajal, glial cells of the mouse spinal cord, 1899, ink and pencil on paper. Courtesy of Instituto Cajal (CSIC).
Right now at the Weisman Art Museum there is a lot of buzz about brains. Following the opening of The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal last week, there is a lot of excitement about neuroscience, microscopes, and the relationship between art and science. However, as developed as our brain imaging technologies may be, we still have a lot of room for development in our conversations around mental health on campus. This year in the WAM Collective, we have been focusing…
Media contact: Susannah Schouweiler, Director of Marketing and Communications, susannah@umn.edu Weisman Art Museum Presents Message from Our Planet, with work by 19 International Artists at the Forefront of Digital Art Weisman Art Museum Weisman Art Museum Presents a Major Survey Exhibition, We Are Working All the Time!, by Multimedia Artist Piotr Szyhalski Weisman Art Museum receives a grant of nearly $240,000 from the federal Institute for Museum and Library Services to support a Truth and Reconciliation project with Indigenous communities Alejandra…
Download the free CloudGuide app to access audio tours, short videos, and more. While in-person public tours of the museum’s galleries are temporarily suspended while maintenance work is underway, the Weisman is thrilled to announce that our free audio tours, of both the permanent collection and public art on campus, are now available on CloudGuide! Enhance an in-person experience in the galleries (keep an eye out for signs with the cloud icon near featured artworks) or enjoy the audio tour…