Different Strokes: Blending Microbiology and Art: Microbiologists collaborating with artists uncover new ways to find beauty and importance in microbes and to make them into art

Although Michele Banks is not a microbiologist, she found herself speaking to a packed room of microbiologists at the 2016 ASM Microbe meeting in Boston last June. “It all started with the paint,” she says. “I was working with wet-in-wet watercolor, making abstract paintings with a kind of bleeding look and fuzzy edges. I had a show at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and the art coordinator told me that … my work looked like ‘friendly little things under a microscope.’”