An unusual artist-in-residence program begets a fantastical creation.
Philadelphia-based artist Judith Schaechter sat quietly in a lab at the Perelman School of Medicine, taking in a discussion about beauty and morality. As the talk pivoted to an examination of the human propensity to form negative judgments about people whose skin is scarred, she wondered how that might inform the art she’d been tasked with creating. Might she consider confronting viewers with images of badly disfigured faces? But Anjan Chatterjee M’85, the founder and director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics (PCfN) [“Gazetteer,” Sep|Oct 2019], had greater expectations of his newly appointed artist-in-residence. “I was looking for something inspired by our conversations in the lab,” he says, “but I didn’t want it to be illustrative or literally representative of our research.”
For two years, Schaechter kept listening, week after week, as Chatterjee, his students, and guest speakers delved into the ways aesthetic perceptions trigger responses in our brain, whether by flipping the Oooh switch or igniting the Ugggh one. The project she finally dreamed up, Super/Natural, is an immersive eight-foot high, domed stained-glass installation that’s on view through September 14 at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
The exhibition is a first for the PCfN. Schaechter, its second artist-in-residence (the pandemic lockdown derailed the work of the first), approached Chatterjee after seeing him speak and reading his 2013 book The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art.The neurologist struck a chord with the 64-year-old artist, whose stained-glass pieces are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her late mother, Barbara Schaechter SW’56, had been a scientifically oriented social worker with a particular interest in autism—and the family’s home was full of books about the brain. “Ultimately, both artists and neuroscientists are interested in figuring out consciousness,” Judith Schaechter says.
The PCfN’s artist-in-residence program is funded by a Sachs Program for Arts Innovation Award, established in 2016 by Keith L. Sachs W’67 and Katherine Sachs CW’69 [“Gazetteer,” Jan|Feb 2017]. “The idea was to have someone with similar concerns as us but who approaches them from a very different direction,” says Chatterjee, whose lab welcomes guest speakers from realms ranging from architecture to tech to business. “It’s a lab that functions better thanks to all of these different ideas.”
“I was excited to hear—and to participate in—the conversations that they had during their meetings,” says Schaechter, who doodled on paper all the while. “One thing that came up a lot was the idea of biophilic design,” which attempts to enhance people’s connection to nature via the built environment. “There was even a guest speaker who was interested in using mycelium [fungal root systems] to make insulation for buildings.”
That particular talk took the artist into familiar territory. Her father, Moselio Schaechter Gr’54, is a retired microbiologist who indulged a special passion for mycology by collecting 17th- and 18th-century prints and manuscripts on mushrooms.
“As a kid, I became interested in these nature drawings and the work of early botanical illustrators like Maria Sibylla Merian and Mark Catesby,” she says. “So when I noticed I had doodled all kinds of pictures of flowers and birds, they began presenting a design vocabulary where I could mix and match elements. Birds have beaks and wings, and flowers have stems and petals, and there are infinite combinations. All of these things were in the air—biophilic design, and their research, and my interest in nature, and the flexibility offered by these design elements.”
Drawing inspiration from magnificent stained-glass windows in Gothic churches, Schaechter “decided I’d make my own church, despite my preconceived notion that scientists might be hostile to that idea.” Yet the PCfN researchers surprised her. “In fact, they were very receptive to the idea of spirituality and wonderment.” Just the same, she chose a punny title in homage to her father’s scrupulously empirical cast of mind. “Whenever we saw religious people walking to church or synagogue, he’d say, ‘We don’t believe in the supernatural,’” the artist explains.
Her otherworldly and kaleidoscopic work now on view at the Michener can certainly be classified as “supernatural,” especially since the flora and fauna that populate it are entirely made up. “I used no references, from either books or the internet,” she says, “only my imagination and memories.”
This wonderland of a chapel is organized according to the cross-cultural concept of a three-tiered cosmos. Step through its opening and 10 panels come into view at eye level; this represents Earth, only jammed with fantastical flowers and impossible insects—blossoms flaring into clam lip formations, bee-like bodies sprouting blood-vesseled wings—swirling around and against each other like phantasms encased in some intricate antique glass paperweight. Tilt your head and Heaven appears in the form of 40 triangular panels that line the geodesic dome; it’s a domain inhabited by multihued birds that flutter hither and thither against a celestial blue sky. Crouch down and you’re in the midst of a doomscape printed on wallpaper; here lies a murky underworld of creepy skeleton heads and unhatched larvae. “It bothers me that biophilia can be sterilized—with no cockroaches, feces, or thunderstorms,” Schaechter explains. “I didn’t want to make a space that has no bugs or death. This underground is about how all of the profusion of life that fills the space is coming out of the dead stuff.”
Schaechter sandblasted, engraved, enameled, and soldered each glass piece by hand, turning to fellow craftspeople for help cutting the panels and assembling the dome. Using a traditional technique called flash glass, she layered paper-thin veneers of deeply saturated colored glass (vivid reds and intense blues) over clear sheets. To achieve a full spectrum of color, she added small amounts of black, yellow, and pink enamel paint to the glass pieces.
Taking cues from greenhouses, planetariums, and ‘refresh rooms’—biophilic refuges in public places like hospitals, airports, and conference centers that she learned about in Chatterjee’s lab—the artist sought to situate the viewer inside the stained glass, not as an outsider merely looking at illustrated panels. “When I first saw Super/Natural in Judith’s home, she left me alone in there with a pillow and I just laid down and stayed still for a half hour,” says Chatterjee. “It’s perfect for that kind of immersion. In studying the aesthetics of architecture, we’ve found three components that elicit positive responses: coherence, fascination, and hominess. She nailed all three.”
Chatterjee says a museum setting doesn’t lend itself to measuring and testing the responses generated by her chapel, but Schaechter reports that she’s received “much more feedback than I’ve ever had for any other piece.” After its stay at the Michener, the dome will be exhibited at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco.
“Awe is my favorite emotion,” she says, “and I wanted to bequeath that to my viewers—I think it’s one of the purposes of art. In the lab, we also talked about the ‘alternative uses’ test to measure creativity, which asks the subject to come up with as many uses as they can for an ordinary object. So I created 100 different designs for birds. I wanted to prove that creativity is infinite and boundless.”
—JoAnn Greco
