Exhibitions
A record of exhibitions and public presentations of work by Genetics of Design.
Science Meets Art Festival 2026
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Cold Spring Harbor, New York
July 26, 2026
Upcoming. Featuring Mobile Genome and PTEN.
Genetics of Design will exhibit two pieces at the Science Meets Art Festival 2026, a biennial celebration of the Celia and Wally Gilbert Artist-in-Residence Program, hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Center for Humanities and History of Modern Biology. On view are Mobile Genome, which maps the genome's mobile DNA as spokes radiating from a ring of chromosomes, and PTEN, a rendering of one of the body's essential tumor-suppressor proteins. The afternoon pairs an exhibition of work by artists-in-residence, laboratory staff, and invited artists with a symposium on where science and art meet.
Event details are on the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory festival page.
Unearth a Story Through Art
Locust Valley Library
Locust Valley, New York
July 6, 2026
Featuring Huey, Dewey, and Lewy, a triptych
For this community art event at the Locust Valley Library, Genetics of Design contributed Huey, Dewey, and Lewy, a triptych drawn from the biology of alpha-synuclein, the protein behind Parkinson's disease.
In a healthy brain, alpha-synuclein is intrinsically disordered: a restless, shapeless chain that never settles into a single form. Under the wrong conditions it begins to stick to copies of itself, locking into a rigid fiber the cell can no longer undo. These fibers gather into the clumps known as Lewy bodies, the microscopic hallmark of the disease. Read left to right, the three panels trace that collapse, the marks loosening and wandering at first, then tightening as the protein seizes, and finally settling into a stiff, near-mechanical lattice.
The title is a quiet play on words: three panels named for the Lewy bodies they depict, with a nod to three well-known cartoon nephews. The story beneath it is a serious one, where order is not a sign of health but the signature of disease.
The Art of Genetics
Glen Cove Public Library
Glen Cove, New York
April 2026
An exhibit by Nabil Azamy & Anthony DeSantis
Life on Earth takes an enormous range of forms, from single-celled fungi to oak trees, from the house mouse to the human being. Beneath that diversity lies a shared blueprint written in nucleic acids. Genetics is as much the study of life as it is of chemistry and physics.
This exhibit makes that shared architecture visible. Each piece turns real genetic data into art drawn by a pen plotter, a mechanical arm that guides a pen across paper with machine precision while leaving subtle variations in each stroke. Those small variations give every piece its own character, so that no two, even of the same design, come out exactly alike.
The exhibit features seven groupings: a portrait of David Attenborough; Macrobiology, tracing life from cell to tissue to organ; PTEN, following the central dogma from DNA to folded protein; Sampson, a commissioned portrait and genetic tile diagram of a Labrador-Pyrenees mix; Gene Density, comparing chromosomal architecture across three species; Genomic Features, revealing gene barcodes, Neanderthal echoes, and parental inheritance; and Mutation Drift, visualizing replication error rates in humans and retroviruses.
Nabil Azamy and Anthony DeSantis created this exhibit. Between them they bring more than 25 years of experience across academic and industrial work, from human genetics to robotics, and a shared fascination with how life is written in its genetics.