Drawing from our natural world: How curator Liz Broughton brings ‘Art of Nature’ exhibit to life

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Liz Broughton wants to make natural history come alive in Santa Cruz. She believes exhibits should be artistic, tactile and enticing. That’s why when you walk into the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, you’ll see a wooden carving of a bat mid-flight and be able to reach out and feel the ridges of its face and fur. You’ll also see a newly hatched sea turtle emerging from its 3D-printed egg and making its way down the sculptural, “sandy” shore. And you’ll see dinner plates adorned with paintings of fish as if they’re ready for you to eat.

The objects are part of the annual “The Art of Nature” exhibit, which runs through May 26, and highlights illustrations, sculptures, posters, journals and more featuring depictions of nature and the natural world. Broughton has curated the exhibit every year for the past decade. 

She says her curatorial style is tied to her appreciation of both art and science. She’s a self-described space nerd who, yes, went to space camp as a child, but who then worked in a biology laboratory during her undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, got a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and Celtic studies and a master’s degree in museum studies from the University of Washington.

“What I like about natural history is that it is really interdisciplinary,” Broughton said. “All of our temporary exhibits here, I think, have instances of art interwoven through. We’re touching on human connections and how human history has impacted the environment and climate around us.”

Broughton grew up in the San Lorenzo Valley and couldn’t believe her luck when, fresh out of graduate school in 2010, she “miraculously, somehow” landed a position at the museum. She’s worked in many capacities – admissions attendant, managing exhibits, even managing the store. Today, she is the visitor services manager and the museum’s longest full-time employee. She watched the museum change its management and work to establish itself as a nonprofit. 

This year’s “Art of Nature” exhibit features 60 works from 40 artists. One special art piece was inspired by something particularly close to home: a fossil found last spring by local elementary school kids. That, Broughton said, helped determine the theme this year of paleontological art. 

Broughton’s enthusiasm is palpable as she walks from piece to piece, with a comment on each. She talks about what it communicates, the materials the artist chose, where the artist lives. Like many attendees, she remembers visiting when she was a child. She tries to make that connection resonant for visitors today. 

“We like to try to include diverse connections with nature … and we’re prioritizing telling stories that are relevant to our local community.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lookout: Tell me about the idea for the exhibit. Why bring art and nature together?

Liz Broughton: Art has a really long history of being a way in which we try to create understanding of the natural world around us. Theoretically, you could say it goes back to people doing cave paintings of horses or lions. Every depiction of an extinct species is technically a form of science illustration, because there’s no other way to depict that species, right? So, art has long been tied to science. It was around before photography existed and it’s a way to focus on details that a photograph might not necessarily be able to bring to life.

Lookout: How are illustrations and other pieces of art like the ones in the exhibit useful to scientists?

Broughton: They’re pretty critical. For example, doing a cross-section of a plant where you can see it all: the root systems, inner systems, blossom, which is not something you would see in real life. There’s a really rich history of using art to communicate science. Even today, I think it exists in more places than people would realize. Museums and parks use it a lot for interpretive panels or on the trails. But it’s also in scientific papers. It’s also in magazines. It’s also people visualizing data.

Lookout: What’s the history of this exhibit?

Broughton: It started in 1989 as the culminating project for the UCSC science illustrations certificate program called “Illustrating Nature.” In about 2009, the certificate program moved to California State University Monterey Bay and exhibits at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. But science illustration was just really loved by our members and we wanted to keep it going, so we recast the exhibit as “The Art of Nature.”

Lookout: Since it’s been running for so many years, how has it changed along with the museum?

Broughton: In the last 10 years since I’ve been here, this has been a big transitional period for the museum as a whole. We’ve had a change in management, we’ve been regrowing ourselves as a nonprofit, and regrowing our staff. But we’ve had artists who return to this exhibit every year and I recognize their names. For example, Megan Gnekow has been doing these really great food web and ecosystem series for several years now. She’s been in the exhibit as long as I’ve been here and she’s helped us to put on the exhibit. In the last few years, she’s joined the museum board, so it’s really cool to have her perspective.

And there’s a piece which is a Smilodon [saber-toothed tiger] family, which was painted by Hannah Caisse. Hannah started out as a volunteer and was a student at UC Santa Cruz, then she ended up going into the science illustration program after talking with the artists we were exhibiting at the time. Like me, she moved back to Santa Cruz and she is now a staff member as a part of our education team. So we’ve really gotten to see her journey, which is amazing.

Lookout: Is there a theme that helps you choose the art that goes in the exhibit?

Broughton: There’s always different themes that come out every year and I think that’s what’s really interesting. We don’t generally have a predetermined plan. It’s really just looking at our submissions and seeing what pops out to us. I mean, every year we know we’re going to have gorgeous botanical illustrations. We’re going to have gorgeous depictions of birds. Those are a given.

But this year, we wanted to focus on paleo art [paleontological art]. There was a fun story in the news. Basically, last spring some students found this fossil, and it was identified as a leg bone – a left radius of a Jefferson’s ground sloth. And this is the first known specimen of the species in Santa Cruz County. Mason Schratter, an intern, created this gorgeous depiction of the Jefferson’s ground sloth, because it’s not a common species. We wanted something unique that would help make the announcement of the fossil find more powerful.

What makes paleo art unique from other forms of science illustration is that you’re basically just using clues and evidence and scientific studies to help inform your depiction, but you don’t have a specimen to reference what the living creature would have looked like, so it’s kind of a unique subset of science illustration.

Lookout: What’s your favorite piece?

Broughton: I do love Mason’s. I had the privilege of seeing it as a work in progress, so seeing the end result is gorgeous. So, I do selfishly like that.

I will say every year there’s a dearth of mammals submitted to the exhibit. I think it is very heavily birds and plants, but I personally am Team Mammal. I love a good mammal. So the piece “The Burrowers” by Jonathan Broberg is one of my picks. It’s cute and fun to look at, but it’s also saying a lot. It’s communicating the variety of native mammal species specific to Monterey that burrow underground, which is an important adaptation and habitat. So a lot is being communicated, which I really love.

Lookout: What have you learned from curating this exhibit since 2009?

Broughton: I think there’s levels of communication going on in the art we exhibit. Like something might, at first glance, just be like a really gorgeous depiction of a mammal, plant or bird. But you’re also depicting a particular kind of plumage, or a particular kind of behavior or adaptation. Having done this for so many years, there’s definitely species that I can identify out in nature now. I can identify birds for example, from art pieces I’ve stared at for two months. Oh, and on a practical level, I now have a gut instinct about how much we can fit on our walls.

Eli Ramos is pursuing a master’s degree in science communication at UC Santa Cruz. Outside of science writing, they are an insect enthusiast, write sci-fi feature scripts and make sounds (music and podcasts). They wrote this piece as part of UCSC professor and Lookout Community Voices editor Jody K. Biehl’s class.