The Luminous Mind: Shimmer LASER Panel at St. John's College

Panel Presenters: Moderated by Tom Greenbaum with Heather Murphree, Paul Biaggi, Susan Latham and Bobbe Besold

Created to inform, inspire and engage, Bobbe Besold's art is rooted in science (mostly biology), politics (social and ecological issues), the beauty of life on Earth and is designed to move people, to encourage awareness and to create positive change. “Part of her subtext is the belief that everyone can make a difference regarding the problems of this world.” Diane Armitage for The New Mexican

Artist Heather Murphree created abstract paintings as visual poems, resulting from a dialogue between the natural world, herself, and the colors, values, and shapes that emerge, seemingly spontaneously, from her intuition. As quantum physics shows that reality prefers fields over objects, and relationships matter more than straight lines, Heather's work blurs boundaries, dissolves certainty and shows that observation matters. Heather has a MFA in sculpture, and lives in Santa Fe with her husband, two dogs, and a garden.

Artist and physicist Paul Biagi's lifelong work has been a journey into the mystery of existence, of life, of consciousness and of what follows. The search will never bring the final answers, the visual metaphors barely touch the infinite.

Susan Latham has been a student of Science and Art since she was a teenager in the 1950's. She is inspired by the geometry of nature-- finding inspiration in everything from lilac buds to sine waves and exploring these forms in a variety of media -- metal, fiber, and photography.

Tom Greenbaum explores the meeting of art and science through the language of repair. As artificial intelligence increasingly engages society, relationships between humans and machines fracture through misalignment, distortion, or the psychological strain caused when AI mirrors us too eagerly. Tom's work treats these breaks as opportunities for reflection, inviting viewers to consider that our digital systems, like ourselves, can break, adapt, and be repaired with intention, humility, and imagination.

Project Venue and Setting
At St. John’s College, science and art are complementary ways of knowing, and all students engage with the great works of mathematics, natural science, philosophy, poetry, music, and literature through close reading and sustained conversation. With a curriculum that moves from Euclid, Darwin and Einstein to the study and illustration of plants and the movement of celestial beings, St. John’s fosters an education rooted in inquiry, imagination, and the enduring dialogue between scientific discovery and artistic expression.

SciArt Santa Fe, founded in 2019, fosters artists across disciplines that reflect the cultural diversity of New Mexico, supports research that addresses issues that disproportionately affect people of under-represented races, ethnicities, religions, genders, sexual orientations, national origins, citizenship statuses and ages including climate change, species extinction and migration, that often do not fit within a traditional gallery framework.

Our Spring 2026 SciArt Santa Fe exhibition features 20 New Mexico artists: Sophie Azzolina, Morgan Barnard, Bobbe Besold, Paul Biagi, Chad Colby, Shirley Crow, Deidre Greenly , Jeanette Hart-Mann , Evgenya Kirichenko, Jessica Lanham, Susan Latham, Richard Lowenberg, Palma Maya-Johnson, Jess Merritt, Heather Murphree, Andrea Polli, Nico Rasmussen, Alyce Santoro, Abigail Sapien and Lila Steffan

This event is free and accessible to all. If you need more information, contact [email protected] with questions related to access and accommodation.

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