User:ArtSciProject/sandbox

Stephen Nowlin is curator/artist whose practice examines the intersection of art and science. He is Vice President, Director of the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Biography

Stephen Nowlin was born in Glendale, California to professional musicians Ray and Roberta Nowlin.

From 1966 to 1969 he lived in Berkeley, attending Californa College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) and experimenting at Mills College Tape Music Center. In December 1968 Nowlin left CCAC and worked for Ladd & Kelsey Architects in Pasadena, where he helped build a model of California Institute of the Arts (Calarts).

In 1969 he worked in the Astro-Electronics Lab at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), drafting computer circuits for the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories and participating in Caltech's E.A.T. (Experiments in Art & Technology) program where he worked with filmmaker and computer animation pioneer John Whitney. In 1970 Nowlin made the 3-minute film NNON, using early motion-graphics programming developed at Caltech.

In 1970/71 Nowlin attended Calarts to finish his undergraduate degree. After Calarts, he worked as a laboratory technician at the University of Southern California (USC) School of Medicine and pursued his own practice and experimentations as an artist.

In 1976 Nowlin married Anne (Hathaway) Nowlin, and in 1978 received his MFA degree from Art Center College of Design and joined the college's faculty. In 1979 he organized, with Fine Art Chair Laurence Dreiband, a survey of paintings by pop-artist Wayne Theibaud. He also pursued his studio practice, exhibiting at such venues as the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary ARt (LAICA), and Topo Swope Gallery.

Curatorial Activities, ArtScience Initiatives

From 1980 to the early 1990s, Nowlin organized over forty exhibitions for Art Center College covering a variety of art and design topics, including the first exhibition of work by 1930s-era photographer Horace Bristol; exhibitions of photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark, art directors Josef Muller-Brockmann and Helmut Krone; group exhibitions with Leo Castelli Gallery and John Berggruen Gallery; and solo exhibitions with David Hockney, Duane Michals, Donald Judd, and Robert Venturi. During this period he also organized solo exhibitions of recent work by James Rosenquist, Judy Pfaff, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris. He managed the installation of a temporary sculpture garden at Art Center that included major works by David Smith, Alexander Calder, Donald Judd, Anthony Caro, Mark di Suvero, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman.

From 1990 - 1992 Nowlin collaborated with architect Frederick Fisher on Fisher's design for the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery on Art Center's campus. Also during this period he began organizing exhibitions featuring an international group of artists engaging with science and using new technologies. Exhibition titles included Digital Mediations (co-curated with Erkki Huhtamo, 1995), Charles and Ray Eames' Mathematica (2000), GHz: The Post-Analog Object in L.A. (co-curated with John O'Brien, 2002), and solo exhibitions with new-media artists Jim Campbell (1997), Sara Roberts (1998), Jennifer Steinkamp (2000), Paul De Marinis (2001), Christian Moeller (2001), and Michael Naimark (2005).

In 1999 Nowlin collaborated with Pasadena's Armory Center for the Arts curator Jay Belloli and Norton Simon Museum curators Michelle Deziel and Gloria Williams Sander to organize the multi-venue exhibition Radical Past: Contemporary Art and Music in Pasadena, 1960-1974, which became the model for a series of subsequent twice-yearly free public events known as ArtNight Pasadena. In 2001 Nowlin created Pasadena CultureNet, a public website index and email distribution list for cultural news and events.

In 2001-2002 Nowlin began a collaboration pairing Southern California artists with scientists at the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering, a Caltech NSF-funded lab exploring sensory systems in machines and biological organisms. It resulted in NEURO (including artists and scientists Ken Goldberg/Pietro Perona, Jessica Bronson, Christian Moeller, Jennifer Steinkamp, Simon Penny/Malcolm MacIver, Martin Kersels/Peter Shroeder, 2003), an exhibition and sixty-page catalogue. In 2004 he guest-curated two site-specific projects on the Caltech campus, partnering with L.A. artists Lita Albuquerque, and Michael C. McMillen.

Subsequent exhibitions examined the differences and likenesses of how art and science view the world: EAR(th) (2004) with artist Steve Roden and Caltech grad student AnnMarie Thomas; AxS: At the Intersection of Art & Science, co-curated with Jay Belloli for the Armory Center for the Arts and Caltech; In the Dermisphere (2007); TOOLS (co-curated with John O'Brien, 2009); ENERGY (2010); WORLDS (2011); and PAGES (co-curated with John O'Brien, 2012). In 2006 he began work on OBSERVE (with artists Lita Albuquerque, Daniel Wheeler, Lynn Aldrich, Dan Goods, George Legrady), a partnership with Caltech's Spitzer Science Center and NASA-JPL Spitzer Space Telescope. The resulting 2008 exhibition and seventy-five page book featured the five contemporary artists' meditations on the implications of deep space astronomy. In 2010 Nowlin was invited by NASA Images to guest-curate an online exhibition from its vast photography archive, which resulted in the six-minute video Things That Float.

Nowlin established the Williamson Gallery as a west-coast venue for art/science traveling exhibitions such as Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace (2000), Situated Realities: Works from the Silicon Elsewhere (2002), Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution (2003), Crochet Coral Reef (2011), The History of Space Photography (2012), and Intimate Science (2013).

Stephen Nowlin has written numerous essays on the superimposition of art and science, and is currently researching and organizing Realspace, an exhibition scheduled for fall 2014.