Santa Fe Institute

Community Event

September 29, 2012
4:00 PM

The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) and the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) will kick off a lecture series, Chaos to Complexity: Artists & Scientists Share Insights Into the Creative Process

4:00 PM — Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (108 Cathedral Place, Santa Fe)

The series explores the creative process in art and science.

Cochiti Pueblo artist Mateo Romero and SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West will discuss how creativity influences and inspires their work – from analysis to collaboration to environment to illumination.

The event, moderated by the Institute’s Valerie Plame Wilson, offers a glimpse of how the artist and the scientist approach their work, and how the discovery process — whether it be painting, photography, or mixed-media art or the study of scale in physics or social systems — can produce that manic, creative energy that drives the process.

• Mateo Romero is a contemporary, award-winning artist often exploring old ideologies to create new meaning. Although his cultural background is an urban one, through his father Santiago Romero and his connection to their Southern Keresan Cochiti people, his experience includes much of the Rio Grande Pueblo world as well. He received an M.F.A. in printmaking from the University of New Mexico.

• Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist who specializes in the study of mathematical regularities underlying living and socioeconomic systems, from cells to cities. Prior to joining the Santa Fe Institute as a Distinguished Professor in 2003, he led the high-energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he is a senior fellow. In 2006, West was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World,” and his work was selected as one of the breakthrough ideas of 2007 by the Harvard Business Review.

The September Chaos to Complexity event will be the first of several discussions with contemporary Native American artists and scientists from the Santa Fe Institute.

The event is free but a RSVP is recommended. To RSVP, contact Patsy Phillips at 505-428-5901 or pphillips@iaia.edu.

More Info

• * SFI community lectures are free, open, & accessible to the public.
• * Seminars & colloquia are geared for scientists but free & open to the interested public.
• * All other SFI events are by invitation only.
• * Note: We are unable to accommodate members of the public for SFI's limited lunch service; you're welcome to bring your own.