1.) Maria Peñil Cobo:
Maria Peñil Cobo was born and raised in Spain and is now a mixed media artist by trade. Much of her work is connected to themes of nature, especially the sea, which she attributes somewhat to growing up in a fishing family. Cobo has a collection of pieces that follow along the traditional form of microbial art. That is, she has made petri dish “paintings” with a medium of agar that bacteria and other microbes are cultured in. She created three main collections of this type of work: “Bio-scapes”, “Nature-scapes”, and “Sea-scapes”, each of which had microbial art centered around the theme of their namesake.
http://mariapenilcobo.com/bioart
2.) Josh Kline:
Josh Kline is an artist who primarily creates sculptures, installations, and videos, with heavy themes on technology and the relationship between technological advances and the human condition. This can come out in facets showing a focus on sanitization, health, and hygiene. With this information, it comes to no surprise that a number of his installations and sculptures have dealt with the integration of living microbes within a body of work— one prevalent example being “Share the Health”, which consists of three hand sanitizer dispensers filled with agar with two cultured with swabs from public areas and one with store-bought acidophilus.
http://www.artuner.com/artists/josh-kline/
3.) Mellissa Fisher:
Mellissa Fisher is a UK-based, self-proclaimed “bio artist”. She has a heavy interest in the idea of a person’s “invisible self”— the ecosystem of microbes that make a person. Along the same lines, she also takes interest in combining fine art mediums with living organisms. The culmination of this interest is her highly experimental piece “Microbial Me”. The work is actually a series of agar sculptures, cast in the likeness of Fisher’s own face. The sculptures are then cultured with swabs from her own skin, creating pieces that constantly evolve over time. The sculpture(s) are a permanent installation at The Eden Project in England, as a part of their “Invisible You: The Human Microbiome” exhibition.
https://www.mellissafisher.com/microbial-me
4.) Tagny Duff:
Tagny Duff is an artist and professor with Concordia University in Montreal. She creates work using intersectionality of the fine arts and science, especially microbiology, while approaching her own work with exploring cultural attitude of the “viral”. One example of her work is an ongoing project called “Living Viral Tattoos”, which is made of human skin, pig skin, Lentivirus, and HaCat cells. The project takes the skin and infects it with the viruses stated before, and eventually using immunohistochemical staining on the skin to visibly reveal the infected cells in a “bruised-looking” effect.
5.) Elaine Whittaker:
Elaine Whittaker creates work in the area where art and science— as well as medicine and ecology— intersect, creating and interdisciplinary medium where she treats biology as a “contemporary art practice”. The majority of her work deals in installations, painting, sculpture, and photography. One of her more well-known exhibitions is “Ambient Plagues”, which is a collection of pieces that reveal the prevalence of bacteria and microbes everywhere, especially the human body, using all of the mediums listed before. A number of the pieces featured live bacteria cultures in petri dishes, usually overlaid on top of photos of people to create a sense of “bioparanoia”.
https://www.elainewhittaker.ca/
6.) Anna Dumitriu:
Anna Dumitriu aims to explore societal relationships with infectious diseases, synthetic biology and robotics using sculpture, installation and “biological media”. Dumitriu has created to shocking works with her integration of deadly “superbugs”. She takes these strains and sews or “inks” them onto everyday cloth objects like clothes. One of which was an exhibition of a quilt that was sewn with MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and a dress infected with VRSA (vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), both of which have been the most talked about “superbugs” in recent time.
http://annadumitriu.tumblr.com/
7.) Alexander Fleming:
A more recognizable face on this list, Nicholas Fleming is attributed with the discovery of penicillin— specifically Penicillium chrysogenum, the namesake of this blog. What is less known about him was his hobby of creating “germ art”. His pieces were made by filling a petri dish with agar and then “painting” differently colored bacteria. His microbial art was more aligned with the traditional agar-and-petri-dish-paintings than the experimental sculptures and installations that modern microbial artists, but it is remarkable to see how the process was essentially the same over such a vast stretch of time.
Penicillium chysogenum 