U-M Creative Currents

Bridging Art and Science

• Arts Initiative • Season 3 • Episode 9

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In this episode of U-M Creative Currents, host Mark Clague explores the intersection of art and science through a unique campus collaboration at the University of Michigan.

Joining the conversation are Professor Todd Allen, Department Chair of U-M’s Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences (NERS), and Devin Wright, a Michigan-based artist and illustrator. Together, they discuss their recent project—a student-designed mural in the NERS building on North Campus—that brings scientific concepts to life through visual storytelling.

Professor Allen, a leading expert in nuclear energy, shares insights on how interdisciplinary partnerships like this one can spark new ways of thinking. Meanwhile, Wright, a graduate of Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, reflects on the power of art to communicate complex ideas and foster engagement in unexpected spaces.





Season 3, Ep. 9: Bridging Art and Science


[00:00:00.930] Mark Clague:
Bye. Welcome to Creative Currents, a Michigan Arts podcast where we explore the power of collaborative creativity and how the arts can spark meaningful conversations. I'm your host, Mark Clague, and today we're diving into a special campus collaboration bringing together art and science. We have here Professor Todd Allen, Department Chair of the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department and a leading expert in nuclear energy as the founding director of the Fastest Path to Zero Initiative and co-director of Michigan Hydrogen Thank you so much for joining us. in the nearest building on North Campus. And that is the subject of our conversation today. Welcome, Todd and Devin. So Todd, what were you thinking? You wanted to get a muralist to come to a building that's connected really with the whole history of nuclear energy in our country.

[00:01:23.445] Todd Allen:
Yeah, so it wasn't so much a muralist in particular, but over the course of my career, I've slowly gotten a better appreciation for art bringing people into conversations. And in a previous job, job. I really wanted to do a big arts-related project. The bosses would not go for it, right? So in the back of my head, I really want to do this. In previous years, I tried to engage with UMS instead. And we actually did an interesting project where a composer and a conductor came in and talked about the similarities between engineering design and a composition and engineering operation and running an orchestra. But for various reasons, that collaboration couldn't continue. It happened in COVID when UMS couldn't do shows. Once they had shows, they had to go back to their real lives. Disrupted a lot of what we were doing, yeah. So then I thought, well, let's try to do something with an artist and more of a mural. And so I talked to the folks at the Art Initiative, and my idea was I want to get an artist to come in and talk to our students. Now, these are sophomores. They're taking their first class in nuclear engineering, and I wanted to have a conversation, talk about their motivations for being nuclear engineers or engineers in general, and see if we could capture it in an image. And you probably went and saw our hallway.

[00:02:36.563] Mark Clague:
up in the building. It took me a little while to find my way downstairs.

[00:02:40.228] Todd Allen:
But in previous years, it looked like a storm shelter, right? It was very uninviting. And so I worked with the Arts Initiative. They had a process. I don't know exactly how they found Devin, but they did. It was great. And then he came in and talked to our students and generated the first mural. And the hope is we repeat this, right? So over time, we get this living history of what our students thought about their careers and why they wanted to do it, but we're interpreting through this conversation with a local area artist.

[00:03:09.239] Mark Clague:
Well, I'm so glad you called the Arts Initiative because that's what we're here to help with, serve as kind of the campus connector for the arts, and I'm glad that you got a yes to this project. So, Devin, as I recall, we made sort of an open call, right, and you got involved, or did we reach out to you directly?

[00:03:24.094] Devin Wright:
Indirectly. Indirectly. huh? Before we get too far into the mural, it's good that you brought that up. I actually want to shout out my friend Josh Rayner. He initially found the competition and then we applied together. Unfortunately, he was not able to be a part of the designing and the actual painting of the mural, but he was involved in all the classroom discussions.

[00:03:44.856] Mark Clague:
Okay, great. So this is a collaboration on the artist side as well as with the students and with our colleagues in nuclear engineering.

[00:03:50.943] Devin Wright:
Most of what ended up on the wall, completely designed by me along with the students and then painted by myself with the students. But those conversations and suggestions from Josh during our group discussions were definitely very important for work? compiled all of their responses. So what kind of questions? Sort of things about where you see yourself in five years, what's important about nuclear. And then the big one was vision. Vision is key for any endeavor or project. So what would you like the vision for this to be? And then what's the vision for your life? So I wanted to make sure that it represented the students and the department.

[00:04:59.646] Mark Clague:
So tell me a little bit about the results. So I did go up and see the mural. It's amazing. But it's, I mean, I can see your illustration background, you've got sort of a lot of different characters. Yes. Does it tell a story or does it evoke certain ideas? It looks like you have a phoenix here for maybe the phoenix reactor.

[00:05:16.442] Devin Wright:
Yes. So in 1948, a group of students from U of M put forth a sort of a proposal to have a living memorial to the U of M students who gave their lives during World War II. So the phoenix building itself is known as a living memorial in a lot of the older university archives historical texts sort of thing. And what Todd brought to this, and I don't know if he did this on purpose, but he essentially proposed a living mural. So we've got a living artwork that's growing every year with new people involved in a living memorial, the Phoenix Memorial building. And that was based off of the Phoenix Memorial Project. I don't want to get too boring here. Oh, it's not boring to me. I'm a historian, so... The Phoenix Memorial Project was launched shortly after World War II, again in 1948.

[00:06:05.815] Mark Clague:
can you...

[00:06:06.355] Devin Wright:
little bit about the reactor. He probably knows more accurately.

[00:06:09.218] Todd Allen:
Yeah, and this is sort of an amazing story for me. So as Devin said, the students, this is student activism, right, drove this project, and the university had to decide what this living memorial would be. This was right after World War II, and they decided they were going to do a campus-wide initiative to study the civilian applications of nuclear technology. So you can imagine a time where most people would have heard the word nuclear and thought about weapons and the war.

[00:06:34.807] Mark Clague:
Yeah, the bombs and... Yeah, exactly. And Japan and all the deaths.

[00:06:38.750] Todd Allen:
Yeah. And the history becomes more interesting because it's the first fundraiser the university ever did. Really? Yeah. And the logic at the time was if we want to lead in an area of discussing civilian applications in an environment where the conversation was very much controlled by the military and the defense establishment, they wanted independence. And they said, we're going to go out and we're going to raise our own money so we can drive our own research without being told what to do. And as part of that, they raised money for the Phoenix Project that included getting the the Ford Motor Company to give them money for what was the university's reactor. And that reactor stayed operational until 2003 before we shut it down.

[00:07:15.129] Mark Clague:
So what kind of civilian applications were developed in that

[00:07:18.552] Todd Allen:
reactor? So they looked at everything from basic science, like how do I use neutrons to understand the structures of materials? But they also looked at how to do power production, medicine. We used to have, if you went up and looked at the building, you probably didn't realize that there used to be a greenhouse up there. there were quite a few windows up top and sort of wrap around the building. Yeah, so that area, they tried to keep a little homage to what it used to look like. But when I was a graduate student, it was a greenhouse. So you're looking at radiation effects on plant life and agriculture. So they did a lot of things with it at the time. And the reason this story ended up being somewhat impactful or meaningful to me is when I got recruited here, I really felt that my field, nuclear engineering, was becoming very insular and not talking to people. And I was like, I need to get them to talk to the rest of the campus. We need to get back out there again, only to find out that this history was the campus conversation. This became a big deal. The students hear me blathering on about the importance of the Phoenix Project. I think some of it came over in the discussions that Devin had with the students, but I think it really matters. Here's where we ended up.

[00:08:27.627] Mark Clague:
compelling. Tell us, Devin, about some of the other images. You've got Nuclear Man and the scientists. It's really evocative of a lot of It tells a story.

[00:08:37.076] Devin Wright:
For sure. So one of the things, and Todd brought this up, I really wanted to drive home the importance of the Phoenix Project. One of the original concepts was a giant phoenix that got shot down pretty quick. But I definitely wanted to make sure that that came through in some regard and brought it up pretty much every discussion. Hey, we need to work in the Phoenix Project because this history is cooler than you guys know. U of M is actually one of the, I think it is the the first nuclear program in the world. So what you're seeing with the mural is actually a combination of three ideas. The top three voted design concepts, because one of the themes is threes, playing along with the atom as three parts. So there's actually three designs incorporated, and one of them is the phoenix. It's also represented three times in three different ways, past, present, future, and it's looking at three periods of time in the Phoenix Project's history, and it goes from background to mid-ground to foreground for past, present, future. So if you look in the background, there is a phoenix, but it's not your typical phoenix. It is very soft, rounded shapes. It's got its wing up, and it's got a laurel in its mouth. And what that is, it's supposed to be a phoenix representative of a dove, because initially the Phoenix Project was sort of a messenger of peace in a time when nuclear was focused primarily on warfare. And then in the mid-ground, you've got the Phoenix project, very small. It's a bird in the hand of the main figure, the scientist, and it is the nucleus of the atom. There's a few different meanings there. The first of which is that the phoenix is sort of the driving force for this spirit of research going on in the department. So it's in the hand of the scientist. And lastly, in the foreground, in the letter R, this was a very popular concept. It's actually one of the top three voted concepts that got worked in as the one, two, three. It represents the future. So the near future, there is a tokamak reactor. I don't think any have been built yet. It's theoretical right now. It is a sort of a fusion reactor. And what happens is it, it looks like a giant donut essentially. And in the middle it generates energy and there's plasma in it. So I said, well, plasma and fire, the Phoenix is fire. So the Phoenix took the place of the plasma in the reactor. So you see a phoenix flying around in the tokamak reactor, and then there's a series of letters and sort of fake equations, not fake, but pseudo equations that mean different things to different people painted on the panels of the reactor. And one of the prominent ones is E equals MC squared per student requests. So that's just a little bit about one of the things that went into the mural, the phoenix theme. The second theme was the spirit of nuclear. And then the third theme was sort of using the acronym of the department and giving each letter a meaning. Some of them have multiple meanings.

[00:11:41.934] Mark Clague:
the NERS, nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, right? So what are the, give me the quick unpack those initials.

[00:11:51.085] Devin Wright:
Sure. So the letter N working in threes, there's three time periods represented here. So NERS from left to right reads past, present, future. Letter N, they couldn't decide on sort of a meaning for N. So I'm not going to put one out there and sort of stamp out other people's opinions on what that should be. But the letter N was taken directly from a historical photo from the U of M archives of some workers from when the Ford reactor was still active. They're pulling out a Cobalt 60 unit. So that photo is homaged, but in my own style. And then the letter E, they decided it would stand for energy and engineering. So you see a group of scientists. Again, it's an homage to an older historical photo from the U of M archives. but I've updated it with sort of modern scientists in a stripped-down lab. And it's blue for, I'm going to butcher this word, but Todd

[00:12:46.323] Todd Allen:
a... Yeah, Cherenkov radiation.

[00:12:48.105] Devin Wright:
Okay. So that's why it's blue. But it is a group of scientists, and then it's blue because of the radiation. So it's energy and engineering showing that teamwork. And then the R, I've already explained most of the R. And the S is the far future. Before I get to that, the N is the past. because it's that direct reference to the historical photo, right? E is the present because it's an updated historical photo, correct? And then the R is the near future with the fusion research. And then the S is sort of the ideal, the far future. It's simplicity and sustainability. So the goal for the future of the department is, as I think he said, race to zero. Fastest path to zero. Fastest path to zero. So sustainability is sort of what they're looking toward, what they're reaching for was the thought.

[00:13:39.419] Mark Clague:
And I was struck by the number of women pictured in the picture. Todd, what were the first women nuclear scientists at Michigan? Was that something early in the history department or more recent?

[00:13:48.929] Todd Allen:
So it's definitely more recent and the numbers are growing. I'll give you a way better answer in about a year. I've got a student who's digging through the archives at Bentley to do a little historical project on the influence of women throughout the Phoenix project. So far, what she's told me is there were a bunch involved in the beginning and the fundraising and the guidance, and then it seems to go quiet. And now they're coming back, right? And I think that's, we definitely see a lot more in the past few years, like growing numbers. And I think that's important. So we wanted to include that in there.

[00:14:19.543] Mark Clague:
So Todd, tell me about the reaction of the community to the mural and sort of, you know, what you hope this is going to, the message it sends to your colleagues and your students.

[00:14:28.493] Todd Allen:
Yeah, so everyone that goes down there really loves the mural. And I think just before I totally answer the question, I should say he didn't mention that the scientist in the center is also an homage to Spirit of Detroit statue. Yeah, I did actually pick that up.

[00:14:41.046] Devin Wright:
Originally, that scientist was going to be potentially female. I think the students suggested Marie Curie because I was sort of looking for different historical figures that we could sort of swap out with the Spirit of Detroit so that it could be related to what you guys do. But eventually, they opted on sort of the universal representation because you've got the Adam there group of scientists and then they wanted the center to be a little bit more iconic as well but the spirit of Detroit and I was at the very beginning I was talking about the contribution of Josh Rainer just from the conversation standpoint and getting good good suggestions out of the students one thing that he did suggest that made it in is he's like we gotta incorporate the spirit of Detroit man and I'm like we can't just put the spirit of Detroit because he's all Detroit all the time but I did riff off of that and develop arguably what's the best part of the mural is the centerpiece, the spirit of nuclear.

[00:15:43.552] Todd Allen:
Part of it we've talked about. I want sort of a living history.

[00:15:46.375] Mark Clague:
So every year there'll be a new mural and it'll sort of progress down the hallway and you're since writing a history of the department in art. Correct.

[00:15:53.964] Todd Allen:
Yep. And I think from an alumni standpoint, they'll be glad to come back and say, I was part of that. I helped Devin paint that one. I think that it's a good opportunity. These are sophomores. This is the first course they take together. So it's an opportunity for them to start to get to know each other beyond studying calculus and nuclear engineering. I also hope that through things like this, people say, wow, there's some really cool art up on North Campus. I want to go see it. And by bringing them in, they'll say, who are the people in this building, right, and learn a little bit about what they do.

[00:16:23.154] Mark Clague:
say you got me because it was the first time I've ever been to that building, even though I've heard about the Phoenix Project ever since I came on campus.

[00:16:29.381] Todd Allen:
Yeah, yeah. And I have since learned that the College of Engineering is doing tours of people where they take you through different buildings and that they we are on the tour now right and if you go in there you probably notice there's a decal on the floor with a QR code and you can grab the history so some of the things we're talking about and we are now on the tour so yeah the other thing I'd say is that we're constantly trying to work on making our department as welcoming as it can be talked to Devin about this ahead of time but the fact that he picked Spirit of Detroit which has a sense of community is important to success Now, I used to just blather on about the Phoenix Project. Now I'm telling them. We actually started something called our Culture Walk. This is part of it. We take the students by and say, you, our students, you created this. This is the sense that this is how you want the department to be. This has become a very influential place in our lives. It's turned out to be maybe better than I thought it was going to be.

[00:17:29.685] Mark Clague:
Devin, a lot of times when we think of the artist, we think of the lone genius working in their basement or their studio all by themselves. genie. But you're doing a different kind of art. And I imagine that brings a whole new level of meaning to your work. You're collaborating with others, but you're sort of leading them on a journey of discovery, not only about the art, but about themselves, right? You're bringing people together, not just by sharing something beautiful, but by sharing the process of creation and that they sort of become part of your work. In really interesting ways, which I imagine this wasn't the thing that they talked about so much in art school, but something you've developed as you've gone forward.

[00:18:13.568] Devin Wright:
Depending on what you do, collaboration is an integral part of it. As you'll see, I'm not a traditional painter. I really don't even consider myself a painter. But I grew up on comic books, take a lot of inspiration from that, as well as painters and fine artists, incorporating the spirit of Detroit and then sort of subtly Diego Rivera into some of the design. choices.

[00:18:36.229] Mark Clague:
the N in particular reminded me of the Detroit Industry Murals.

[00:18:38.652] Devin Wright:
That's exactly where it was. So you've got several Detroit references hiding in this one. But comic books, there is the lone genius and then there's also the team. And I think just growing up being interested in that world, I was always open to sort of having some projects be collaborative

[00:18:55.890] Devin Wright:
And I wanted to introduce in a way artists and art culture into the talks and with the students. That's partially why I referenced some of these artists just so that they would take a look at them.

[00:19:09.924] Mark Clague:
And Todd, do you see there being a connection between sort of science and art?

[00:19:13.388] Todd Allen:
I do. I mean, another part of my motivation is I worry when we recruit students into engineering. And you look at what they do in high school, they're musicians, they're artists, that our tradition is to ask them to check that at the door, right, and just start studying math and things. Whereas in reality, engineering should be a very creative application, right?

[00:19:32.269] Mark Clague:
problem solving, you have to invent new solutions. Yes. Not like different than inventing a melody or inventing an image of the spirit of engineering.

[00:19:40.758] Todd Allen:
Right. And so it's partly a signal to them to say, keep that, right? Keep that in your life as an engineer.

[00:19:47.806] Devin Wright:
For sure. Some of the questions we actually asked them were, what types of media do you enjoy? And if you could put it into words, why? Why do you like it? What do you like about it? Can you take that part that you like, figure out how to make sense of that idea so that we can incorporate it into something I think it's pretty cool that Todd was just so open throughout the whole process in letting the student ideas and frankly a lot of my ideas just you know he would leave them alone

[00:20:23.002] Mark Clague:
yeah well you've definitely left a mark Devin on the campus and on the nuclear engineering building so thank you so much thank you Todd for being sort of open and reaching out to the arts initiative I'm really glad we could get this partnership going and And I think we probably have 19 or 20 more interviews by the time you get this project going forward.

[00:20:41.040] Todd Allen:
You saw the hallway, right? Yeah, it's pretty big. A couple decades worth of opportunity there.

[00:20:45.905] Mark Clague:
really great. Well, we love to see the arts infusing the campus. And I'm particularly excited about when we can highlight the power of the arts in areas we might not think of as the arts aspects of the school. But creativity is for all, and the arts are for all. So thank you so much for being our guest today on Creative Currents.

[00:21:02.299] Devin Wright:
Thanks for inviting me.

[00:21:12.609] Mark Clague:
Creative Currents is a project of the University of Michigan Arts Initiative. Please subscribe to hear more great conversations with artists, scholars, and arts leaders from across the campus and across the globe. Send your comments and suggestions via email to creative currents at umich.edu. This episode of Creative Currents was produced by Mark Clague and Jessica Jenks, and our audio engineer is Audrey Banks. Our original theme music is composed and performed by Ansel Neely, a student at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater, and Dance. To learn more about the University of Michigan's Arts initiative, please visit our website at arts.umich.edu. Thanks for listening.