Spring 2010 | Issue home

Not Just Another Day in the Park

Pitt’s annual Science festival would soon be upon them, and Donna Beer Stolz, associate director of the University’s Center for Biologic Imaging, and her team wanted to once again wow the crowds. They had in previous years supplied the festival with eye candy like The Periodic Table of Electron Microscopy (see our Spring 2009 issue). For fall 2009, they decided to bring new life to old art, creating mosaic replicas of paintings of the masters.

Using the free program Andrea Mosaic, Stolz and her crew drew from the millions of biologic images they had on hand to build their own masterpieces. In Stolz and Co.’s version, the woman’s bustle in Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, for example, includes images of a trachea (hematoxylin and eosin stain), a dust mite (scanning electro­­n microscopy), and fat tissue (fluorescence). Here’s a gallery of their work. Don’t miss the Center’s take on Wood’s American Gothic (oddly, scans of mistakenly delivered boxes of breast implants ended up in Pa’s shirt) and, of course, Coolidge’s timeless Dogs Playing Poker.

View Mosaic Gallery

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1884¬–1886. (Detail of bustle mosaic below.)

—All images courtesy Pitt’s Center for Biologic Imaging

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