Wheaton College Norton, Massachusetts

Observing the connection between art and science

Beard and Weil Galleries director Michele L’Heureux ’88 conducted a fall session for Professor Elita Pastra-Landis’s “Advanced Organic Chemistry” students. At L’Heureux’s invitation, the professor agreed that it would be great to expose science students to the gallery (where many of them had never been) and also to engage them in close observation and conversation that could improve their skills of analysis, which are essential in the discipline of science. “Elita and I crafted some questions for them to consider, and Elita wrote those up and asked the students to respond in writing after our session together in the gallery,” said L’Heureux. “They were asked to consider the connections between art making and chemistry, and we discussed each of the five artists in the ‘Sitelines’ exhibition. One artist, Kysa Johnson, uses the molecular structure of pollutants as the building blocks of her drawings, so we spent a lot of time analyzing her work, since it was quite relevant to their studies.”