A Hive of Creativity
 During the summer, hundreds of strangers sat on Keith Waddington’s couch—a Technicolor Marshmallow creation he adores.
The University of Miami biology professor didn’t mind. In fact, he barely missed sitting on it himself. He was too busy upending his world in the name of art.
For five months, his living room’s entire contents—from the sleek Wassily chair to the collage portrait he created of his dog, Wilbur—were on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. Meanwhile, Waddington and his wife, fellow scientist Mindy Nelson, Ph.D. ’92, hosted a series of salons in their Coral Gables home, welcoming neighbors, friends, and colleagues and filling the semi-furnished space with impromptu projects and discussions. “What emerged was just amazing,” says Waddington, on the faculty since 1977.
The exchange, dubbed “Salon Colada,” was Los Angeles-based artist Fritz Haeg’s entry in a group show exploring relationships. Waddington, who began cultivating his own artistic side a decade ago, saw it as a perfect chance to plumb the intersections between art and science.
Haeg’s instructions were minimal: Make the salons as spontaneous as possible and have participants sit on the green pillows he’d left behind to instill a primal, “around the campfire” vibe. At the first gathering, contributors—who ranged from molecular biologists to painters—read definitions of art, science, and community. “It self-generated into this discussion of art and science—the differences in processes, the similarities, and whether the two processes can really be merged to produce something bigger than either of them,” recalls Waddington, whose newly created seminar, ArtScience, debuted this fall.
Communal activities at subsequent salons included dissecting a novel on India’s caste systems, building a percussion section from found sticks and bottle caps to accompany a Spanish electro-acoustic guitarist, and conjuring island-themed works from a variety of objects neither artistic nor scientific in nature (Legos, pipe cleaners, rubber frogs, coconuts).
Even prior to these experimental events, Waddington’s art was informed by science and social behavior. In the lab, he researches the activities and navigational methods of bees. In his photo collages, hive-like repetitions play with perception, offering viewers a new perspective on their surroundings. Delving into art after decades of conducting tightly controlled experiments, Waddington admits, has been liberating: “It was a refreshing sort of change or shift—an opening experience.”
This latest endeavor taught Waddington not only that humans are as busy as the little creatures he studies at UM, but “once you bring them together, things emerge that are not expected. The people who come are dying to interact and learn new things and describe what they do.”
Sitting on green pillows helps.
—Marika Lynch
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