Intersections

A Public Art Exhibition

Word map of the phrase 'Intersections' with colorful intersecting lines and words forming a pattern
A woman with short reddish-brown hair and fair skin is smiling softly in a casual indoor setting with blurred background, wearing a gray patterned high-neck top.
A woman with short gray hair wearing red glasses, silver earrings, and a black turtleneck, smiling slightly against a plain gray background.

QED Arts, LLC

Pacific Lutheran University mathematics professor Jessica K. Sklar and artist Bronna A. Butler began collaborating as QED Arts, LLC in 2020.

Jessica is passionate about the fact that math doesn’t just live in textbooks and classrooms, but is also found in our neighborhoods, our galleries, and our stories. She seeks to share her love of mathematics via her art, scholarship, and teaching. Whether she’s writing about math and popular culture, Mad Veterinarian problems, or tortoises learning about infinity, her hope is that others will see that math is a vibrant subject which can speak to both the child and the aesthete in each of us. 

Bronna has a B.A. in Art and an M.S. in Accounting from the University of Missouri. After being a financial executive for 22 years for creative entrepreneurial firms in design, publishing, and telecommunications, she founded B.A. Baroque Arts, LLC in 1997. She has completed numerous commissioned pieces, including a twenty-foot-tall stainless-steel monument, 900 square feet of stained-glass windows, and over 140 oil and pastel paintings. In 2015, she began creating glass sculptures and two-dimensional artwork with a mathematical and scientific focus.

Artwork

Dürer's Cat

Limited-edition print of a pastel
24” x 20”

$425

Drawing of a cat lying on top of a puzzle box with numbered sections, a small mouse figure, puzzle pieces, an alphabet wheel, an hourglass, and address and phone number cards.

This piece celebrates Renaissance polymaths Albrecht Dürer and Leon Batista Alberti; in particular, it pays homage to Dürer’s engraving Melencolia 1 by featuring the Durer polyhedron, its net and a magic square. The viewer is invited to identify the obscured numbers in the magic square (the first row of which represents a key date in Dürer’s life) and to use the Alberti polyalphabetic cipher disk to decipher the secret message on the mouse’s banner.

“

„