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October 7, 2024

Two Scottsdale Arts Exhibitions Explore Connections Between Art and the Mind

Visit Scottsdale Civic Center this fall, and you will have the opportunity to experience two coordinating exhibitions that invite viewers to contemplate how art can influence our minds.

Janet Towbin: Meditative Mindscapes will be on view from October 7 through December 31, 2024, at the Civic Center Public Gallery inside the Scottsdale Civic Center Library, and Brains and Beauty: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience is on view through January 19, 2025, at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA). We sat down with the curators of these two exhibitions to learn more.


Wendy Raisanen
Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, Scottsdale Public Art

Wendy Raisanen curated the upcoming exhibition Janet Towbin: Meditative Mindscapes. Raisanen will celebrate 30 years with Scottsdale Arts in November and has spent 23 of those years in the Public Art department. The artist featured in the exhibition, Janet Towbin, is a local creator who focuses on art and photography.  

Scottsdale Arts (SA): What inspired you to curate this exhibition?  

Raisanen: I wanted to have an exhibition that would resonate with the general feeling of what Laura Hales is curating with Brains and Beauty: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience at SMoCA.

SA: Tell us about the process: what did it take to make this exhibition possible?  

Raisanen: I’ve known Janet Towbin for a few years and am amazed by her prolific output. We went through her studio, picking out pieces that fit this idea of meditative artmaking. The work she does fits in quite well with these concepts. She does a series of work on a single shape, idea, or concept. These meditations are an active way to calm and focus her mind.

Mandala 2 Leaf by Janet Towbin

SA: What do you think is unique about art in how it can transform our way of experiencing and understanding our lives and the world around us?  

Raisanen: Art can be a meditative and peaceful activity, both for the artist and the viewer. Anybody can tap into the flow of drawing aimlessly and telegraph your thoughts or feelings into a pencil or pen on paper. It feels good!  Repeat a shape over and over and understand it completely.  Artmaking can be a place of peace, where it almost feels like your ideas and movements are somehow brought to you from somewhere else, a different consciousness.

SA: Which artwork do you resonate with the most in the exhibition? 

Raisanen: Towbin’s 1967 Swirl. I am attracted to bright colors and love orange. This one has the feel of the psychedelic posters of the 1970s, and the swirling lines and repeated triangles within the concentric circles are very similar to absentminded drawings that I do all the time. It even reminds me of quilts I’ve done. While it’s a very active and exciting image, it brings me peace and focus. I truly enjoy letting my eyes wander around in it.

1967 Swirl by Janet Towbin

SA: What do you hope visitors take away from this exhibition?  

Raisanen: I hope people leave the exhibition inspired to try some of these ideas themselves. It doesn’t take any fancy materials to start—a pencil, pen, and a piece of paper, and an open mind.

Come to the opening reception for Janet Towbin: Meditative Mindscapes on Thursday, October 10, 2024, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. This event is free and open to the public and will include light refreshments.  The exhibition itself is free and open to the public whenever the Civic Center Library is open. View library hours here.


Laura Hales is the curator of learning and innovation at Scottsdale Arts. Hales typically curates educational exhibitions for the Scottsdale Arts Learning & Innovation department in the Center Space Gallery, located inside Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. She also leads programs focused on arts and wellness, such as Memory Lounge.

Hales has been working on the educational side of things at Scottsdale Arts for 16 years.  She recently curated Brains and Beauty: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience, which is generously supported by the Tom and Marilynn Thoma Foundation and the Arts Bridges Foundation with in-kind support from Barrow Neurological Institute.

Laura Hales, curator of learning and innovation, Scottsdale Arts Learning & Innovation

SA: What inspired you to curate this exhibition? 

Hales: As a museum educator, I was initially curious about what happens when people look at art and why people respond differently while looking at the same artwork. Then I learned that a whole scientific field is looking at this, called neuroaesthetics! They ask the same questions about art and experience that museum and art educators have considered for decades.

Although neuroaesthetics is an emerging field, they already have scientific proof [through brain scans] for what happens in our minds when we look at artwork; they can see which parts of the brain light up. This scientific aspect turns the question of “What happens in our mind when we experience art?” into something that can be quantified through research.

(Hales also explained that she has been fascinated by neurology after having some of her family members experience neurological issues, talking to doctors, and learning more about the brain through this journey.)

SA: Tell us about the process: what made this exhibition possible, including the scientific research behind it? 

Hales: I mostly worked with Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, the director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, who is very much at the forefront of this field nationally. It has been great working with him, and I have learned a lot! It took about two years to do all the needed research and planning to make this exhibition happen. Working with Dr. Chatterjee entailed showing him artwork I found for the exhibition and discussing whether the artwork accurately explained his research principles well. He provided a lot of direction and helped give this exhibition scientific grounding.

M. Jenea Sanchez, Self Portrait 3, 2021, C-print. Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art Collection, gift of the Friends of Mexican Art.

SA: Where do the artworks in the exhibition come from? Are they a part of the SMoCA collection?  

Hales: In addition to pieces sourced from the SMoCA collection, I worked with the Thoma Foundation and the Art Bridges Foundation to borrow art that fits with the exhibition intent. I also wanted to showcase the projection artwork Art Must be Beautiful, Artist Must be Beautiful by Marina Abramovic, which I borrowed from the Lisson Gallery in New York. The Abramovic piece helps set the tone and was the first artwork chosen for the exhibition. There are also eight pieces in the exhibition from Arizona artists, so this exhibition features art from local and national artists.

SA: What do you think is unique about art’s ability to transform our way of experiencing and understanding our lives and the world around us?  

Hales: The central question in neuroaesthetics is why our brains evolved to appreciate art. Art is human-made and isn’t something you would think is necessary for our survival or good for our minds to experience. Part of the mystery of neuroaesthetics is understanding this phenomenal thing of art and the human relationship to it, harkening back to the days of cave art and petroglyphs; why did we spend our time doing that? That art is still aesthetically pleasing to us today, all these years later; why is that? There is a lot of mystery in art, and that is what makes it interesting. This exhibition aims to answer some of these questions.

SA: Which artwork do you resonate with the most in the exhibition?  

A museum visitor views Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations, Study I, 2019, Collection of the Tom and Marilynn Thoma Foundation. Photo: Scottsdale Arts. 

Hales: That is tough, but I must say the Refik Anadol video artwork Machine Hallucinations, Study I. There is something magical about this piece that makes you wonder how in the world it was created, and when you know how it was created, it makes you like it more! Refik Anadol collected photos he found online [of landmark buildings] from around the world that people took on vacation. He has these architectural buildings morphing into each other but in an interesting way that imitates torn paper that is moving, turning into shapes, and continues changing. It is a calming process watching this artwork, and it is at once surprising and predictable.

When you see architecture or a landscape, a space in your brain called the parahippocampal place area (PPA) is activated. This artwork tricks your mind into thinking you are looking at an architectural building and, therefore, activates the PPA, but the artwork is almost always in flux, and you are experiencing something other than architecture most of the time.

SA: What do you hope visitors take away from this exhibition? 

Hales: I hope this gives people a new way to look at art and the curiosity to learn more about art. With more knowledge about what is happening in our brains when we look at art and experience something aesthetic, the hope is that the next time you go to a museum or view art, you ask yourself why you find it beautiful.

Information about experiencing Brains and Beauty: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience at SMoCA can be found here, along with details about the pay-as-you-wish days.


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