Florida’s insects as art: Get past the yuck factor
At an entrance of the University of Florida’s Steinmetz Hall, home of what one university survey rates as the world’s top entomology department, sits a display case of bejeweled curios. When you look closer, you see that they’re all insects: a diamond-studded dragonfly, bejeweled bees, a ladybug lighter and more.
It’s a welcome mat not only into the building but into the science behind ants, bed bugs and butterflies. Andrea Lucky, the display’s curator, wants to teach, not preach, about insects.
Lucky is all right brain in her approach to the study of ants, but she switches hemispheres to share that science with the public with an appeal to the left brain.
Lucky is a Ph.D. in entomology, an ant doctor. She works for UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. She never took a college-level art course or interned with a curator. So she taps other minds — students from UF’s College of the Arts.
She’s been inviting those students into her lab to turn damaged or unwanted specimens in the Entomology Department’s teaching collection into works of art. It has resulted in an exhibit titled “Capturing Nature: The Insect World in Art” at the UF Harn Museum of Art, as well as a master of fine arts student’s solo exhibit featuring insect-based collages and drawings.
What she’s doing is important because art can bridge a chasm between scientists and citizens. In the case of insects, science presented as art can overcome a yuck factor. It can make science more accessible than a thicket of academic papers through which scientists talk primarily to each other. And it could help penetrate entrenched beliefs that wall off a mind from new facts.
Lucky’s husband, Jiri Hulcr, a UF/IFAS forest entomologist, takes a slightly different approach. He employs insects themselves as artists.
Hulcr’s exhibit of bark beetle carvings in the UF Florida Museum of Natural History captivated visitors with the intricacy of the designs and the accompanying “About the Artist” plaques that give background on the species of beetle that created them.
These two projects show that art and science have much in common — they both look at the world around us, both the everyday and the exotic, in various ways to make new discoveries.
They also both represent a way to increase our understanding of our world. Science is under attack from people confronted with inconvenient facts that don’t square with their beliefs or livelihoods. By raising questions, art can lead the way to science for answers, for science remains the best tool we have to establish truth as we know it.
Let’s face it, a lot of entomology is how to kill insects that munch crops, deliver disease with their bites, or even destroy your house. But the truth is that we live in their environment. The overwhelming majority of living things around us are interconnected with one another and ultimately with us — we depend on them.
Presenting insects in a context that allows us to explore our fascination with them instead of our revulsion to them opens a channel for real learning and appreciation. Kids love critters. The desire to kill them is not in our nature.
That’s important in Florida, the insect capital of the United States and the gateway for an average of a new species arrival every month.
There’s a public interest in knowing more about insects. There have been ballot referendums on whether to release certain kinds of mosquitoes into communities. People who understand how insects transmit disease can take steps to protect themselves. Pest control is big business in Florida. Farmers who produce much of the nation’s winter citrus and vegetables decide whether and how much to spray millions of acres of crops.
If art raises public awareness of science or makes people willing to see and hear about insects, that’s an important service. But if it awakens in them a curiosity to know more, it has a lasting impact that’s good for people and good for communities.
Whether you see insects as art or artists, we hope you’ll never look at the ground beneath your feet the same way again. Mostly, we hope you’ll just look at the ground at all and remember that science is with you every step of the way.