Artists explore identity in four shows

Works in photos and textiles go deeper than aesthetic enjoyment.

Four shows this month deal with personal identity — how it’s formed by the past and how we are forced to deal with it, one way or another. But the ways that the four artists explore it are different.

Chicago and Atlanta photographer Thomas Dorsey is widely known for his at-home portrait photographs of African American families, including Andrew Young’s. Curated by Andi Mckenzie, “A Very Incomplete Self-portrait: Tom Dorsey’s Chicago Portfolio,” through July 16 at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, is the first appearance of a singular body of work that Dorsey has only recently allowed to be publicly recognized.

In 1971, Dorsey undertook a reflective reexamination, through carefully composed black and white photographs, of the neighborhood where he grew up. Their more subtle meanings are amplified by the pairings of photos in the one-of-a-kind portfolio he has given to the Carlos.

Some of the socially revelatory pairings are fairly evident, as in the photographs of the modest-looking stores on the middle class side of Fulton Street and the even more humble architecture of a store on the other side of Fulton, the street that marked the boundary of Dorsey’s neighborhood.

An audio guide accessible through QR code explains some of the hidden realities, as when Dorsey remarks that the school, documented through innovatively composed photographs of fire escapes or playground equipment, always reminded him of a prison.

At 7 p.m. Thursday in the Jones Room of Emory University’s Woodruff Library, Dorsey will engage in conversation with

system,” Nieh said. “One of the most complicated animal communication systems known.”

The figure-eight

For their research, the team recorded and analyzed footage of European honey bees in 10 colonies in the lab of Ken Tan, a senior professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and another paper co-author. Tan has endured thousand of bee stings over his research career. “I love bees,” he said with a laugh.

Young bees in half the hives could observe old ones doing what bee biologists call the “waggle dance.” In the other half, young bees were deprived of experienced dance partners with which to practice.

To the human eye, bees dance at breakneck speed. To perform the waggle, the insect shuffles forward while furiously wiggling its abdomen back and forth — “so fast,” Nieh said, “that it usually is a blur.” The bee circles back around to do that gyration again and again, forming a figure-eight pattern on the honeycomb.

The routine is encoded with oodles of information. The angle of the middle of the figure-eight tells foraging bees which direction to fly. More repetitions means richer food. And the more a bee wiggles, the farther away the food is.

Bees about 10 days old without experienced dance partners performed the waggle dance more inconsistently than their 10-day-old counterparts in hives with experienced bees. Over time, the bees became better at conveying the direction of the nearby food, but they could never get the dance moves for communicating distance quite right.

“The waggle dance is thought of as one of the most remarkable innovations of animal communication — a symbolic language in an insect. But it was previously dismissed as ‘just innate’ — and therefore in many people’s understanding, less impressive,” Lars Chittka, a sensory and behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University of London, wrote in an email.

But this new research “opens up a wholly new perspective,” said Chittka, who was not involved in the study.

“Cultural spread might have been how some elements of these behaviours first emerged,” he said.

Bees are smarty pants

Bees work so well together — some scientists call hives “superorganisms” — that people have long thought they had a sophisticated way of communicating.

Aristotle observed the waggle dance and noted bees kept returning to the same flowers. In 1973, Austrian biologist Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize in part for translating the dance’s meaning. More recently, researchers have trained bees to pull a string and even to teach each other how to play a miniature game of soccer. (The goal: tug a tiny ball to the center of a platform.)

Today, though, there’s a threat to the dance party. Tan and Nieh’s previous research shows widely used pesticides can harm the pollinators’ ability to learn.

After exposure to the poisons, “the waggle dance changed,” Tan said. “They have more errors.”