Josef J. Johnson, Niuafoʻou Eclipse, 1930

September 27 – December 15, 2024

Images convey information. They embody arguments, theories, and worldviews and seek to persuade viewers of their truth and significance. Starting in the sixteenth century, actual images, not just imagined ones, became increasingly central to scientific arguments with the global spread of the printed book. Ever since, our notion of science as objective has drawn authority from illustration, photography, and film, blending phenomena in nature with their visual interpretation. Today, historians of science and, indeed, scientists themselves increasingly see laboratories as sites for the creation of images, bringing numerous disciplines, including art history and art itself, into closer conversation with science.

Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020 is the first exhibition of its kind. It explores the rich pictorial record embedded in the Caltech Archives and Special Collections and augments it with popular images and contemporary artworks. In 1912, Nobel laureate Thomas Hunt Morgan, the founding chairman of Caltech’s Division of Biology, and technician Eleth Cattell coined the phrase “crossing over” to refer to twists or breaks in chromosomes that combine genes from each to produce offspring different from both parents. It serves as a potent metaphor for the complex interchange between science and the visual arts at this influential institution—in a process that has been both fertile and fraught with difficulty.

Bookended by two global pandemics, the exhibition spans one hundred years—from 1920, when Caltech assumed its current name, to the present day. It unfolds in three independent but interconnected movements—The Infinite Lawn, Time Stream, and Powers of Ten—taking viewers from the “universe without” (suns, moons, planets, galaxies) to the “universe within” (cells, genes, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles), and back. As part of PST ART’s region-wide exploration of the interface between art and science, Crossing Over reveals new facets of life and work at Caltech as they informed, and were informed by, the vibrant visual culture of Southern California.