From 1961 to 1973, a loosely organized group of artists and scientists coalesced around the radical idea that the emerging technology of the computer could be used to make a different kind of art. Known simply as the New Tendencies, this heterogeneous movement included dozens of men and women from the far reaches of the industrialized world. Often working under collective monikers such as Equipo 57 or Grupo Anonima, most of them were as ambivalent about individual fame as they were about the artistic status of their activities, which they preferred to call “research.”

However they saw their own work, their visual innovations were quickly recognized as cutting-edge art, and in a matter of years began appearing in landmark exhibitions at venues such as the Louvre and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how widely Darwin’s ideas on natural selection and the evolution of human kind traveled in the cultural milieu of his day, even in the age of stagecoaches and month-long journeys across the Atlantic. Artists of all shades reacted to his revolutionary theories, and this exhibit attempts to capture their range of responses in all sorts of mediums, including paintings, photographs, sketches, and sculptures. Sprinkled amidst 200 works of art are historical collections of natural wonders like beetles, fossils, gems, stuffed birds, and plated flowers. These items give visitors a distinctly visual sense of what artists—and Darwin himself—grappled with during the Victorian era, as academic science began to challenge the subjective nature of romantic art.

The exhibit categorizes Darwin’s artistic influence into tidy themes like the Darwinian “struggle for existence,” the ancient history of earth, the kinship with other animals, the origin of man, and the nature of