For my first profile, I talked with Angela Johnson, an installation artist, art teacher and the Program Coordinator at the Madison Children's Museum. Johnson is currently finishing her Masters in Art Education at UW-Madison.

Johnson works with stained glass as it relates to nanotechnology through the IPSE (Interns for Public Science Education) program at UW. IPSE is a branch of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center funded by the National Science Foundation (whew!).

How did you get involved with this kind of art?

I've always been interested in sculpture and form. I'm interested in the idea of line, and how color interacts with light, especially translucent. I like to make things that revolve around light and color and how the two interact with each other.

I started out [the job with IPSE] with only five hours a week working on researching stained glass and slowly putting the program together. My main project was the stained glass.

I've always been fascinated with glass, how light interacts with color. I took a class at The Vinery - they're in my opinion the best in town for classes and glass you can buy.

Tell me a little bit about the art itself.

It's not exactly stained glass - it's stained glass-ish. The pieces that you look at when you hold it up to the light look like stained glass. Medieval stained glass artisans using their molten mixtures knew if they add just a little gold to their molten glass it would turn to purple or a reddish color. If they wanted yellow and various other colors, if they added a small amount of silver, the nano-particles would break up and cause a color change.

[A few words about nanotechnology here, just for clarification. Nanotechnology is the manipulation and study of materials at the scale of a few hundred nanometers or less (that's really small!). The basic concept is that elements like gold and silver behave differently on a "nano" scale than on a "bulk" scale. Johnson's aim is to connect science and art, using the creation of stained glass as a teaching tool.]

What kinds of outreach have you done with the stained glass?

We're able to work with kids and do this, but obviously hot molten glass is not an option, so using a simple lab experiment that middle schoolers can do, they can actually see the color change in a beaker and they add poly-vinyl alcohol which acts as a plastic matrix. They can use it to make stained glass window panels using liquid leading.

I've created a study guide and a classroom guide that have been field tested in several major museums. For the Kids' Arts Festival, we had the kids make sun catchers. Also, middle school students in the "Art as Science" class for the People Program created "nano" stained glass window panels on transparencies.

I taught a class at the Madison Senior Center, making small stained glass window panels on transparencies. The whole purpose of IPSE, the internship, was taking complex science theories - especially nanotechnology and making them understandable to the general public.

[For the Madison Children's Museum Art and Science Fusion Camp which she teaches this week, Johnson modified the museum guide to make it understandable for kids finishing grades 1 through 3.]

It's OK if all they understand when they walk away is that "nano" is really, really small and that cool things happen at that small level, like adding a little bit of gold can make something purple - even if little kids think, "it's kind of like magic."

See the art!

Angela Johnson's piece at the Senior Center, made in cooperation with class participants and funded in part by the Madison Arts Commission, will be unveiled at their 25^th Anniversary Celebration, 1-4 p.m. Aug. 25. The unveiling will be one of many events to celebrate the Senior Center's 25 years as a Madison organization.

The center is located at 330 West Mifflin Street. To see the stained glass during regular hours, stop by between 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. weekdays or check the Senior Center Web site for more information.

blog archive

2008

blog bio

Lindsay Christians covers theatre, dance, opera, classical music and visual art for 77 Square and The Capital Times.