Mesa Schumacher '04

Two-thousand nineteen is an exciting time to be a graphic artist, according to Mesa Schumacher ’04. This year, Mesa’s artwork has appeared in both Scientific American and National Geographic Magazine, among other scientific publications. At times, Mesa is creating art to better people’s lives by illustrating anatomy and what is going on in the body. Other times she might be creating animation modules to illustrate how a surgery will unfold or visually translating real data from MRIs.

“Art is so important right now,” says Mesa, who holds a master’s degree in Biological and Medical Art from Johns Hopkins University. Currently, her studio and home are in Nepal, where she lives with her diplomat husband, Austin Lewis, and their one and a-half year old daughter, Zephyr. “Science art is a groundbreaking area where data is coming into art.”

Mesa’s role as an artist is to translate complex scientific material for the general public, and at other times, to communicate information from scientist to scientist.

“Often scientists are in the weeds—they know so much, but they can’t step back,” explains Mesa. “So it’s nice for them to work with someone like me who has a somewhat substantive knowledge of their field and can probe and ask questions, such as what is exciting about this information? What is ground breaking? What matters? I am a visual information translator and sometimes that means being very simple, other times big and flashy is what matters.”

Illustration for Scientific American, September 2018, comparing brain areas responsible for higher cognitive functions in humans and chimpanzees.

Illustration as an Essential Tool

Mesa was a sophomore at Stanford University, earning her B.S. in Anthropological Sciences, when she went on an archeological dig in 2006, and it was there that she first realized scientific illustration was a job.

“I learned you couldn’t adequately photograph certain rocks,” explains Mesa. “Some, like obsidian, cleave irregularly and refract light; you get a lot of glare and it’s inherently hard to scan. Plus, you can’t remove some of these materials from the country of origin. The best tool you have is illustration.”

After graduating from college, Mesa started freelance illustrating for academics. For three summers, she worked at an archeological site in central Turkey called Catalhoyuk—a Neolithic site, 9000 years old. As the archeological illustrator, she reconstructed where the cooking and living happened, how the people died, and how they were buried. “At this site they buried their dead under the house beneath a platform structure, so I was taking what traces were left and rebuilding that story,” explains Mesa.

Illustration of an ochre sea star ecosystem

Developing as an Artist

When Mesa was in Upper School at Northwest, she was already drawing up a storm. “I kept these notebooks and my notes would be these detailed comic characters popping out and saying things,” recalls Mesa. “My senior project in Primate Biology class was a series of scientific illustrations comparing fossil teeth casts of an extinct North American primate, Notharctus, with their living relatives, modern lemurs.”

Mesa testifies that she was definitely influenced by the school’s art classes and the fact that so many people around her were artists. In her photography class with Lyn McCracken, Mesa was fascinated with the darkroom and what she could do with double exposures, creating effects with chemicals, light, and other materials.

“After NWS, I taught myself digital photography and now I have a broad tool box. Sometimes I’ll approach the illustration like a photograph and paint with light rather than color—I gained that ability at Northwest.”

A Joyful Career

Mesa puts a high value on the way she and her fellow students were taken seriously by Northwest faculty. “No one ever said ‘Oh, you’ll never be a photographer.’ They said ‘Yes, you could do this, just try it out.’ I don’t think I would have had the courage to take creative leaps if I hadn’t gone to Northwest.”

Recently, Mesa was tapped to launch a puzzle project with Genius

Games Company. She created jigsaw puzzles of anatomically correct body dissections: one of the head and neck, one of the thorax with lungs and heart, and one of the stomach and guts. The puzzles are targeted for anyone from middle school age upward. In addition, she has started doing portraits of women in science, technology, engineering, and math and putting them out on social media.

“I never run out of subject matter,” says Mesa. “I love synthesizing ideas and figuring out how to explain them. I can’t imagine another career that would make me so happy.”

Mesa, with her husband Austin, and daughter Zephyr, taking photos in Bhaktapur, Nepal, 2019.