Artist Story: Peter N. Gray

I am a sculptor and a former biomedical scientist residing in Chicago for 25 years and originally from the East Coast. My work expresses the inherent aesthetics of genetics, microbiology and physics in sculpture and paintings.

Some of the funds from the 2007 grant helped provide a unique base of African red granite for a new steel sculpture entitled Point Mutation. This sculpture recently received an award from the city’s Lincoln Park/Lakeview Community Art Initiative (www.lpcai.org) and is installed on the DePaul University campus near Belden and Halsted. The rest of the grant is being used to construct an even larger steel sculpture that will be completed before November and will be submitted to Chicago area sculpture shows for 2008.

The goal of this year’s CAAP project is to enhance my opportunities for exhibiting large sculptures in public art forums by creating one or two sculptures at full-scale. Up to now, the majority of my steel sculptures are less than 6 feet tall and best suited for indoor or private outdoor display. I made several maquettes for larger pieces but do not have an extensive record yet of converting these to larger sculptures and displaying them in public spaces. I am hoping the CAAP grants improve my competitiveness for public art projects and competitions.

You received a CAAP grant in 2006 as well. How were you able to use those funds?

The 2006 grant enabled me to receive training in bronze casting. The training I received at the Chicago Fine Art Foundry was a unique one-on-one hands-on experience that serves as a foundation for further sculpture using this process. These first pieces were incorporated into new pieces of work as the original castings in a medium-sized outdoor sculpture. I also gained a new appreciation for the complexities and time required to convert a sculptural idea into a finished cast piece of art. The experience of learning bronze casting provided me with another technique to express my artisitic concepts and to broaden the potenial exhibition base into the area of public art.

Last year’s grant also provided the opportunity to convert some clay and wax sculptures I made during a residency at the Vermont Studio Center into bronze. I am using these sculptures as part of my project for the Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs Neighborhood Arts Program (NAP). This classroom program teaches Genetics and Sculpture at the Arthur Dixon Elementary School in the Chatham neighborhood. It features the Genographic Migration Project started by the National Geographic Society. In addition to each student making a sculpture based on a genetic concept of DNA, chromosomes, RNA, proteins or inheritance, the entire class is jointly designing and building an installation depicting the results of each of their ancient ancestor’s migration as determined by mitochondrial DNA analysis.

As a result, I recently installed my sculpture entitled Ascendancy on the school grounds. Ascendancy is a stainless steel and bronze conceptualization of the status of African Americans from the recent diaspora (the past 400 years) to recent times. This project has since led to a series of small bronze and lava sculptures addressing the the origin of humans and the original diaspora starting from East Africa approximately 100,000 years ago.

How has the CAAP grant, or grants in general, affected your career?

The CAAP grants have been essential to developing my current sculpture portfolio. Steel, bronze, stone, foundry costs and general expenses associated with large sculptures require high upfront payments not associated with many of the other art forms. While I obtain much of my steel by recycling construction steel from salvage yards, it is neither free nor plentiful.

The 2006 CAAP grant resulted in Johnsonese Gallery selecting my work for a solo sculpture exhibition in April 2007 and Prairie Title Gallery selecting work for an exhibition in Oak Park during May and June 2007. While I’ve approached galleries in the past with a mix of 3-D wall pieces and a few freestanding sculptures, the grants enabled me to broaden my body of work and have enough pieces to “fill” a gallery. Selecting and being selected by a gallery is an effort of persistence and improvement of one’s work until there is a mutual understanding of the sculptor’s view and the gallery’s needs and persona.


Peter Gray received training in art and graphics at the Delaware Art Institute and a New York graphics design firm, earned a Bachelor of Arts & Science from the University of Delaware, a Master of Science from the Northwestern University Medical School, and a Ph.D. in biomedicine from The University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the M. D. Anderson Tumor Institute in Houston, Texas. In addition, he’s completed a two-year residency at the CNRS in Marseille, France.

He works at Metal-i-Genics Studio located in Chicago’s West side and teaches a special Genetics and Sculpture program in a Chicago public school. Peter is an Illinois Road Scholar, a participating member of Chicago Sculpture International, the International Sculpture Center, and ASCI, the Arts & Science Collaboration, Inc. in New York City.

“One of my goals is making science available and understandable to the general public and I think art is one way to achieve this. The underlying concepts emanate from multidisciplinary biomedical experiences and artistic training, as well as extensive travels in Europe and Asia. Each piece is designed to bring the artistic aspects of science into the realm of each person. What do the sex chromosomes really look like? What genetic structure underlies Fragile-X syndrome? At times I capture the ironic concept of human beings trying to recreate themselves with technology—the development of “humanoids” as the further development of task-oriented robots into androids and cyborgs. My series on Android Genomics, genetic sequencing of androids, should they have any, is one such endeavor.”