Brookhaven National Laboratory And The Parrish Art Museum Present PubSci On September 21

The Parrish Art Museum invites guests to raise a glass to both art and science this Friday, September 21, when it welcomes Brookhaven National Laboratory’s PubSci series.

The subject of this edition of the “science café” is the 15th century painting “The Crucifixion; The Last Judgment” by Dutch artist Jan van Eyck and what a sample of the oil paint revealed about why and how works of art deteriorate over time and what can be done to improve their preservation.

The program, “Illumination: Revealing the Secret Chemistry of Oil Paintings,” will be presented in the Water Mill museum’s Lichtenstein Theater, which will be transformed into a casual pub setting with a variety of international and domestic beer and other libations on offer. Guests will be able to put questions to Parrish Art Museum Director Terrie Sultan and scientists from BNL in Upton, Stony Brook University, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City who analyzed the painting.

To say the scientists put the painting under a microscope would be accurate—but would undersell it. They used BNL’s National Synchrotron Light Source II, an ultrabright X-ray microscope. Called NSLS-II for short, it is one of the most advanced synchrotron facilities in the world with “world-leading capabilities for X-ray imaging and high-resolution energy analysis,” according to BNL.

The first PubSci was held in 2014 at Hoptron Brewtique in Patchogue, focused on the Big Bang with scientists from BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. It has moved to taverns in Bay Shore, Huntington and Port Jefferson since then with topics such as nanotechnology, nuclear medicine and climate.

“The thing tying them all together is it’s all research that we do at Brookhaven,” said BNL spokesperson Pete Genzer. “We always like to feature at least one of our scientists and then bring in a scientist from Stony Brook University or another local university, either academic or a hospital, or somewhere that can add to the panel and talk about the work that they’re doing. We try to give different aspects of the same topic coming from different speakers.”

This is the first time BNL is holding PubSci in partnership with another institution, namely the Parrish.

For “Illumination” at the Parrish, the BNL scientists on the panel are Karen Chen-Wiegart, who is also an assistant professor of materials science and chemical engineering at Stony Brook University, and Juergen Thieme, who is also an adjunct professor of geosciences at Stony Brook University. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Silvia Centeno is a research scientist in the Met’s department of scientific research.

Ms. Chen-Wiegart, who holds a doctorate in materials science, explained that Ms. Centeno approached her in 2015 about studying the degradation of paint with advanced X-ray techniques.

“The chemicals in the paint can be quite complex over the hundreds of years that they evolve,” Ms. Chen-Wiegart said last week. The morphology changes, as does the chemistry, transparency and color of the paint, she said, adding that external factors—light, humidity and temperature—have effects to study.

Ms. Chen-Wiegart was a PubSci panelist back in 2014 on the topic of using beams of light to expose the structure of materials.

“It was really fun,” she said, noting that she got to talk about subjects that typically don’t come up in scientific talks, like the human factors of research—including the fact that she met her husband, fellow BNL scientist Lutz Wiegart, while on a research project.

PubSci does not use PowerPoint presentations as part of the program, but interesting images are displayed—in the case of Ms. Chen-Wiegart’s last time as a panelist, one of the images was her wedding photo.

For PubSci at the Parrish, slides will include images of the microscopic chemical features in the sample from “The Crucifixion.”

Ms. Chen-Wiegart said PubSci is an approachable event for the general public.

“We were quite impressed by all the questions we received in the setting,” she said.

“Illumination: Revealing the Secret Chemistry of Oil Paintings” will take place at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Friday, September 21, at 7 p.m. Admission is $12 for adults and $9 for seniors. Guests may arrive at 6 p.m. for a curator’s talk in the galleries. Visit parrishart.org or bnl.gov/pubsci to register.