School of Art alumna Shiloe Fontes has always loved science and art, so she decided to combine the two at the Flandrau Science Center.
“The art and science connection is so strong, but it gets overlooked. I wanted to figure out how to bring that back in,” she said.
Fontes (BA ’07, Visual Communications; MA ’22, Art & Visual Culture Education) has served at the Flandrau Science Center & Planetarium for 12 years. Today she is the planetarium and design manager.
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‘It’s always a mystery.’
“I do all of the graphic design for the exhibits and a lot of the design aspects for the planetarium shows,” she said. “I work with the exhibit director to design all of the panels, the interactives and the visuals of all the exhibits.”
Her office is a time capsule of her design work, including a giant, great white shark propped up next to her desk. From designing exhibit panels to creating illustrations, she gets to do a little bit of everything.
“None of my days are exactly the same,” she said. “It’s always a mystery. That’s my favorite part.”
Fontes said her family works in the STEM field. Her dad was an engineer and her aunts were microbiologists. She originally attended the university as an engineering student before changing her major.
Connecting audiences to science with art
She became interested in photography and art in high school, but she didn’t consider art as a career path until her sophomore year of college, when she discovered that she could be a designer.
“There was still always this thing in the background, I still wanted to do something sciencey,” she said. “And so just through a series of perfect storms and circumstances, I was able to do design for both the College of Science and eventually for Flandrau.”
She said her position at Flandrau ignited her passion for science and art when it comes to education. She sees a variety of kids come through the science center with this idea that they couldn’t understand science.
“Having interactive and creative ways to learn these scientific concepts is super important, especially with kids and their short attention spans,” she said. “I really wanted to figure out how to do what I’m doing better.”
With the help of CFA faculty
Fontes said back during her undergraduate career she did feel worried about having a career in design.
“That was still a really big question as I continued on,” she said.
With the help of the CFA faculty, Fontes was able to find an internship with a local designer in town and that experience taught her how to do basic website development.
“That set me up to feel really confident in the decision I made to go into that degree because I had a supporting faculty that wanted to help us succeed,” she said.
Applied Intercultural Arts Research
Fontes is continuing her education as a PhD candidate in Applied Intercultural Arts Research. She wants to strengthen her science communication to bridge the gap between science and art.
“I’d like to continue to do what I do here at the planetarium but take it to the next level. I want to help the science center become a hub where artists and researchers alike can collaborate,” she said. “And maybe even teach! There are a lot of opportunities out there.”
She said the advice she could give a fine arts student getting out into the work force is to get creative.
“When you really look at each of the fields there are creative aspects to everything,” she said. “So I think looking outside what you think a job would be.”