Manifesting Ecologic and Microbial Connections

“I’m a pop artist using natural history as my iconography,” Alexis Rockman has said of himself (1). Pop art, a movement that coincided with the youth and music phenomena of the 1950s and 1960s, draws its subject matter from the modern urban consumer experience, adopting popular culture icons and introducing them to the art world, much as American artist Andy Warhol incorporated and immortalized in his work canned soup and actress Marilyn Monroe (2). A man of his times, Rockman lives and breathes the culture of his native New York City, drawing inspiration from it, absorbing its trends, obsessions, conflicts, and fears, which he then brings to life in fantastic images created from nature. Apart from a brief stay in a remote area of Peru, where his mother, anthropologist Diana Wall, did field work, Rockman grew up an urban child in an Upper East Side apartment oddly populated with newts, cats, boa constrictors, iguanas, tortoises, and lizards. He collected specimens and kept poisonous dart frogs, which he drew from a very young age, and planned to be a scientist. His playground was the American Museum of Natural History, where his mother worked with anthropologist Margaret Mead. The museum’s extensive collections and dioramas became an influential part of his childhood. The artists who created the dioramas, he later said, were guided by the same painters who inspired him, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt (3). His interest in zoology and botany was rivaled by other interests, among them film making and animation. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated from New York’s School of Visual Arts with a major in illustration. He worked as columnist and illustrator for Natural History magazine, while he gradually moved toward fine arts and started to show his work in solo and group exhibitions. A major influence was artist Ross Bleckner, whom he served as assistant for a time and who advised him to move toward modernism (4). A leader among contemporary artists returning to figurative content, Rockman wants to paint what he sees (5). Taken with the natural world, he studies not only nature’s creatures but also the puzzles surrounding them: their origins, survival, adaptability, evolution. Plants and animals are photographed and researched in libraries, their native habitats, or the Bronx Zoo. He delves into taxonomy and molecular biology and has enlisted the help and gained the following of paleontologists, biologists, ecologists, ichthyologists, and other scientists, who provide him clues to the accuracy of his exacting images. He has traveled to the rainforests of Brazil and Guyana in search of authentic