Materials Science and Engineering

Multiple Courses – College of Engineering

Faculty Curators: Ashwin Shahani (College of Engineering, Material Sciences and Engineering), Timothy Chambers (College of Engineering, Material Sciences and Engineering), Yiyang Li (College of Engineering, Material Sciences and Engineering), Brian Iezzi (College of Engineering, Material Sciences and Engineering), Kyle Bushick (Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering), George Lindemann (College of Engineering, Material Sciences and Engineering)

On view: Winter 2022

One way to define art is the transformation of physical materials into a new form that conveys meaning. For students of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), every work of art in the museum poses interesting questions. How do artists work with the innate qualities of their materials? How do some artworks boldly show their materiality, while others cleverly suggest the presence of other materials? How does the artist’s work with the materials shape our experience of the object?

The objects featured in this section demonstrate some of the surprising ways material scientists think about art: artistic uses of imperfections in metal fabrication processes; how different materials fracture and break; micro and macro structures in nature; and an exploration of wood, contrasting its natural forms with instances of its malleability.