Hillary Mushkin
Research Professor of Art and Design in Engineering and Applied Science and the Humanities and Social Sciences
Grounded in drawing, Hillary Mushkin’s art and research examine the power and limits of human and technological observation.
Overview
Grounded in drawing, Hillary Mushkin's art and research examine the power and limits of human and technological observation. Her work centers on the ongoing initiatives Data to Discovery and Incendiary Traces, as well as a pilot Visual Practices Lab that integrates them. In all three arenas, she engages collective visual practices—combining handmade and technological imaging, representation, and modeling—to connect seemingly disparate phenomena and communicate those connections to diverse audiences.
In Data to Discovery, a data visualization, art, and design collaboration based at NASA/JPL, Caltech, and Art Center College of Design, designers, scientists and engineers co-design tools to advance understanding of Mars, Earth's environment, and other active research areas. Incendiary Traces brings together artists, designers, scholars, and technologists to critically examine the political and historical facets of landscape visualization. Mushkin's recent research focuses on groundwater loss in California's Central Valley and the science and politics of clouds, modeling interdisciplinary approaches to seeing and understanding the environment.
Publications
Art Exhibitions
SWANS (Slow War Against the Nuclear State): Atomic Dragons, Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA (2026)
Research Art Lab at Orford Ness, Orford, UK (2025)
Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West, part of Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, CA (2024)
From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments, Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA (2024)
Crossing Over: Caltech and Visual Culture, 1920-2020,Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Caltech, Pasadena, CA (2024)
Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art, Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Williamson Gallery, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA (2024)
Art Book Sections
Mushkin, Hillary. 2024. "From the Field: Survey to Surveillance" in Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West, edited by Jennifer A. Doyle, 35-39. Los Angeles: Autry Museum of the American West.
Mushkin, Hillary. 2024. "Groundwater." In From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments, edited by Irene Georgia Tsatsos, 230-235. Pasadena: Armory Press.
Humanities Publications
"Drawing the Drone Archive", co-author Katherine Chandler, in Writing with Light Journal, issue 2, published with Institute for Community Engaged Research (ICER) Press at University of British Columbia, Nov. 2023
"What Becomes of a Rock" in Society and Space Journal, book review of A People's Atlas of Nuclear Colorado, June 2023
"Survey to Surveillance" in Places Journal, April 2021
Science Publications
L. Pham, K. Hu, N. White, M. Joo, A. A. Renchon, T. Schneider, K. Blackwood, S. Lombeyda, H. Mushkin, and S. Davidoff, "Visualizing Climate Model Outputs with CliMAScope," in Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), 2025.
L. Pham, K. Hu, M. Joo, N. White, A. A. Bloom, K. Blackwood, S. Lombeyda, H. Mushkin, and S. Davidoff, "Interactive Visual Analytics of Carbon Cycle Science," in Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), 2025.
2024 A. Coscia, H. M. Sapers, N. Deutsch, M. Khurana, J. S. Magyar, S. A. Parra, D. R. Utter, R. L. Wipfler, D. W. Caress, E. J. Martin, J. B. Paduan, M. Hendrie, S. Lombeyda, H. Mushkin, A. Endert, S. Davidoff, and V. J. Orphan, "DeepSee: Multidimensional Visualizations of Seabed Ecosystems," in Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2024, doi: 10.1145/3613904.3642001.