Our cover art this month is the creation of Kevin Clarke, a New York City artist who is known for his genomics-related artwork (his genetic portrait of James Watson appeared in GT’s April 2003 issue). Clarke took this photo on September 11, 2001. After inverting it to negative and enhancing the colors, he overlaid the photo with a genetic sequence from Craig Carlson, a firefighter with Tribeca Ladder Co. 8, who survived the disaster. Clarke’s work is included in Mikey Flowers 9/11: Ashes to Ashes, Dust to DNA …, a book that he and Manhattan florist Michael Collarone, a.k.a. Mikey Flowers, co-created. The art in the book is also the subject of an exhibit running through September 8 at the Hecksher Museum of Art in Huntington, NY, near Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
The hardcover 96-page book, now part of the Smithsonian collection, can be purchased for $20 at www.arsgenetica.com.
Jim Duffy, who drew the cartoon that appears in this month’s Blunt End, has been a technical artist in the graphic arts department at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for the past 16 years and says he enjoys “applying a nondigital point of view to an increasingly digital-dependent world.” His sketch of “Chez Bio-Informatique,” the brainchild of fruitfly expert Suzanna Lewis, originally appeared on the cover of the abstract booklet from Cold Spring’s Genome Informatics meeting that took place May 7-11.