July 24 – Sept. 24, 2006

The brains of Lance Armstrong, Lucille Ball, and Sponge Bob (as imagined by high school students) will be on exhibit at the Weise Gallery of the Health Sciences and Human Services Library this summer. As part of Brain Awareness Week, the annual Brain Art Competition was held to encourage interest in studying the human brain. Art is a wonderful way to introduce students to the world of neuroscience, and knowledge of the structure, form and function of the brain is necessary when recreating its image. In the sixth annual University of Maryland Brain Art Competition, high school students from the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area were instructed to recreate the brain of any person in any context. It could be their own brain or that of a famous person, a brain sleeping or composing a great symphony, a brain on drugs or a brain of the future. It could be anatomically correct or abstract.

The 2006 winner entitled Bird Brain was created by Olivia Sullivan from Thomas Jefferson High School. In addition to the 2-Dimensional Hand-Drawn category, there was also a Computer-Generated Art Category won by Lauren Miller of Mount de Sales Academy for her work entitled God’s Brain. The winning 3-D artwork was Ecological Evolution created by Bomyi Lee of The Polytechnic Institute in Baltimore.

The competition is the brainchild of Dr. Norbert Myslinski from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Maryland Dental School. He is the Director of Brain Awareness Week in Maryland and a member of the UMB Program of Neuroscience.

A small reception honoring the artists and opening the exhibit will be held at the Library from 6:30 to 7:30 on July 31.

From Baltimore, parts of the exhibit will travel to Atlanta to be displayed for a week at the Society for Neuroscience Convention in October. For more information about the competition e-mail Dr. Myslinski at nmyslinski@umaryland.edu.