With the University of South Carolina Brain Health Center now fully open, I am thrilled to share the completed installation of artwork from my ongoing project, Aesthetic Instincts: The Intersection of Art and Science in the Life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Distributed throughout the building, the exhibition brings together three interconnected bodies of work: landscape paintings depicting places where Cajal lived and worked, ten large-scale panels based on my drawings of his scientific imagery, and two architectural wall coverings developed from one of my original Cajal drawings.
Observation and Discovery: Ten Panels of Cajal's Science
Moving through the Brain Health Center, the exhibition shifts from the world Cajal inhabited to the microscopic world he investigated.
The ten large-scale panels are derived from drawings I created as part of my Fulbright research in Spain. During that research, I had the extraordinary opportunity to work directly from Cajal's original scientific drawings. Studying the originals was essential not only to understanding how Cajal made his images, but also to examining the relationship between their form and content: how drawing itself became a means through which he observed, interpreted, and communicated the organization of the nervous system.
The installation includes imagery of the retina, hippocampus, Purkinje cells of the cerebellum, olfactory bulb, pyramidal neurons, the Calyx of Held, growth cones, and nerve regeneration and degeneration, along with a portrait of Cajal. Collectively, the works address several ideas central to his scientific legacy: the neuron doctrine, the directional transmission of information through neurons described through dynamic polarization, the organization of specialized neural circuits, the development of neural connections, and the fundamental relationship between structure and function in the nervous system.
The retina and hippocampus drawings are examples of Cajal's ability to infer function through structure. By studying the morphology, position, and relationships of individual cells, Cajal proposed directions in which information traveled through neural systems. In the hippocampus, for example, the arrangement of dendrites and axons allowed him to infer how signals could be received by one neuron and transmitted onward to another.
Other panels reveal his interest in how neural systems develop and respond to injury. His studies of growth cones proposed that the developing tips of neurons actively navigate toward their destinations rather than forming connections randomly. His investigations of nerve injury similarly distinguished degeneration from regeneration and helped establish that successful regeneration depends not simply upon the neuron itself but upon the environment through which it attempts to regrow.
Seen together, the ten panels are not simply illustrations of individual scientific discoveries. They present drawing as an investigative process. Cajal's remarkable ability to move between looking, drawing, interpreting, and theorizing allowed him to make visible an organization of the nervous system that could not otherwise be directly seen.
From Drawing to Architecture
The final component extends this relationship between art and neuroscience beyond individual artworks and into the architecture of the Brain Health Center itself.
For the wall coverings installed on the first and second floors, I began with one of my 11 × 14-inch Cajal drawings created while working at the Berkeley Art Museum. I scanned the original artwork and developed it into a repeating pattern capable of covering walls approximately nine to ten feet high and fifteen to twenty feet long.
The process required thinking very differently about the drawing. An image originally created at the intimate scale of a work on paper had to function across an architectural surface. Through a series of iterations, I considered the colors of the Brain Health Center, the dimensions of the walls, the scale of the imagery, and the way visitors would visually encounter the pattern while moving through the building.
We ultimately selected imagery that offered variation in shape and a lyrical sense of movement. Repetition transforms the individual cellular forms into a visual rhythm that can be followed across the wall, allowing the imagery to become part of the experience of the space itself.
The source drawing is connected to Cajal's studies of cells he classified within the "third element" of the nervous system. Cajal and his laboratory recognized these cells as distinct from neurons and astrocytes, although it was his student Pío del Río-Hortega who later distinguished microglia and oligodendrocytes through specialized staining techniques.
At this greatly enlarged scale, microscopic forms become architectural ones. What began with Cajal looking through a microscope, recording cellular structures through drawing, and attempting to understand the organization of the nervous system ultimately becomes imagery that surrounds people moving through a contemporary center dedicated to understanding and treating the brain.
Place: Landscapes from Cajal's World
The ground-floor installation consists of plein air paintings I created in Spain at locations connected to Cajal's life and work. Rather than simply depicting historic sites, I approached these paintings by considering Cajal's own visual experience of these places. I stood at windows and doorways he would have looked through or passed during his daily life, painting the surrounding landscape from vantage points connected to his routines.
These works are particularly meaningful to me because observation was fundamental to both Cajal's science and his artistic practice. Cajal frequently spent his mornings studying histological preparations through the microscope and his afternoons walking through Madrid's Retiro Park. He would later return to the laboratory and translate his observations into the extraordinary scientific drawings for which he became known.
Several of my paintings explore the landscape surrounding his home near Atocha and the environment he would have encountered during those afternoon walks. The light filtering through foliage, the negative spaces between branches, and the changing forms of the landscape provide another way of thinking about Cajal, not only as a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, but as a person moving through and closely observing the world around him.
Installed on the ground floor, these landscapes introduce the human and geographical context for the scientific imagery encountered elsewhere in the building.
Art, Science, and the Act of Looking
For me, one of the most meaningful aspects of having this work at the Brain Health Center is the relationship between the artwork and the purpose of the building itself.
Across the installation, Cajal can be encountered at several scales. The landscapes place us within the environments he inhabited. The scientific panels move inward, toward the microscopic structures he spent his life studying. The wall coverings then expand those structures outward again, transforming cellular imagery into an architectural environment.
That progression, from place, to observation, to scientific discovery, to architecture, reflects something fundamental to my larger Cajal project. His scientific achievements cannot be entirely separated from his extraordinary capacity for visual observation. Drawing was not simply a way for Cajal to illustrate discoveries after they had been made. It was integral to how he investigated the nervous system, organized what he saw, and communicated ideas about structures that were extraordinarily difficult to comprehend.
More than a century later, those same images continue to shape how we visualize the brain.
It is an extraordinary honor to have this body of work installed throughout the University of South Carolina Brain Health Center, a place where research, clinical care, education, and our evolving understanding of the brain come together. In this setting, Cajal's historical images are not simply references to the past. They become part of a contemporary environment devoted to continuing the work that defined his life: looking closely at the nervous system in order to understand it.
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