Ormsby will work with Portland artist Meech Boakye and PICA artistic director Kristan Kennedy to create an interdisciplinary mystery project.
By Bennett Campbell Ferguson
July 3, 2025
Mathematics professor Kyle Ormsby acknowledges that a certain amount of mystery surrounds his upcoming project with , an organization that provides support for scientists, artists, and producing partners to undertake seven months of exploration.
“I’m not sure how awesome a story it is: ‘Reed professor intends to do art,’” Ormsby says. Yet that very nebulousness is what makes Open Interval enticing: It has selected 15 interdisciplinary trios to collaborate on…well, anything.
“The uniting force is a real openness to collaboration and exploration,” Ormsby says. “The thing that’s bringing us together isn’t our disciplinary backgrounds, but rather an enthusiasm for exploring new ideas and seeing what that refractive process results in.”
Open Interval, which is part of the Simons Foundation’s Science, Society & Culture division, has selected a sweeping array of visionaries for the 15 trios. The participants hail from such disparate fields as astrophysics, biology, neuroscience, performance, sculpture, and sound art. Ormsby will be working alongside Portland artist Meech Boakye and PICA artistic director Kristan Kennedy.
“I think from an outsider perspective, it can seem like a strange partnership,” he says. “But the creative and exploratory stuff that happens when I’m developing a new mathematics project [requires] vulnerability and collaboration. My technical expertise, paired with that openness, can meet [Boakye and Kennedy’s] artistic vision and expertise.”
The collective vision of Ormsby, Boakye, and Kennedy could manifest in myriad ways, since Open Interval hasn’t dictated strict requirements for the trio’s project. In fact, they haven’t dictated that the team has to create a project at all.
“I don’t anticipate that we’ll do nothing, [but] there’s no line in the contract that says you got to have a thing,” Ormsby says. “We’re all certainly interested in seeing what emerges.”
What will emerge? The backgrounds of each member of the trio present tantalizing possibilities. Ormsby studies homotopy theory and algebraic geometry; Boakye specializes in biomaterial research and digital gardens; and Kennedy’s stewardship of PICA’s mind-bending oeuvre suggests boundless possibilities.
“Kristan is thinking about how to record some conversations or have some kind of process piece that describes how things emerge over time,” Ormsby says. “But then we’ll also be working with PICA to exhibit…whatever it is we end up doing.”
The trio recently decamped to upstate New York to spitball ideas at a retreat, but art (and math) lovers will have to wait to see what creative fruits are born of their melding of minds. Not to worry: “Reed professor intends to do art” is nothing if not a promising prospect.