Rein of Invention

The 12th Leonardo Challenge

The Rein of Invention

Chain
Chain is as ancient as Hepaestus, the artisan god of the forge. It is an essential tool of the blacksmith’s art. With rings and hooks of chain, a blacksmith tethers the world. Leonardo draws chains as he dissects the anatomy of invention.

Forge a link. Add to it. Multiply it. The sum or product will always be more than the parts. Rigid materials flex. Iron rises and falls in pounding waves to moor a ship. Gold cascades over a dancing shoulder. Forged beads blow across the page.

The image of chain is an essential tool of thinking. Chains bind and enslave. Chains connect and transmit. Chains inhibit or carry movements and ideas.

The Challenge
Bead chain serves us with such quiet grace that it is all but overlooked. Think links. Invent uncommon uses and meanings for this common connector. Pull at the images, ideas and implications of chain.

Principal Underwriter
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

Sponsors
Brown-Forman
Bead Industries
Lehman Brothers Engravers
Robert Lisak Photography

Contributors
Artspace
Hamden Garden Center
Moka
Service Point

Photography.by Robert Lisak www.robertlisak.com

Invitation
Email Invitations
Junior Leonardo Challenge Invitation
Pictures

Invitation

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When it reins, it pours.

Plate LXIX, Royal Library, Windsor Castle, detail

The 12th Leonardo Benefit

Thursday, April 6th 5:30 - 9pm

Celebrate creativity.
Enjoy fine champagne,
and savor inventions
from the creative kitchen of Doug Coffin.

Support the the work of the Eli Whitney Museum
through your presence and your purchase of
artwork invented for this event.

Email Invitations

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Unfettered Imagination

Chain can charm.

Fine Food, Festive Spirits, & Unfettered Imagination

The 12th Leonardo Challenge
The Eli Whitney Museum
April 6th, 5:30-9:00

Food -Chain Breakthrough

Press Release
New Haven -4.1.06 Yale University’s Office of Cooperative Research and Bead Industries of Milford, CT announced today a remarkable harvest of university and industry collaboration. The 100 year old manufacturer of bead chain has turned to cutting edge research to create an entirely organic production technology to produce its signature product.

Yale molecular biologist Jack Stockbean has restructured the DNA of garden variety peas (pisum satvum) to create non-endospermic seeds and hypocotyl links of steel: bead chain. Dr Stockbean had set out to enrich the iron and mineral nutritive values of the Fabaceae family. His Frank’nbeans as they are affectionately known on Yale’s Science Hill are in his words “a serendipitous fruit of that research”. Dr Stockbean hastens to add that his chains are not to be consumed as food and thus require no FDA approval or USDA regulation.

University vice president, Michael Morand, commented: “Jack is far too modest about his work. Few people know that he started out in work with cows and, before any of that research made it to the marketplace, he traded careers for work in plant genetics. His the the kind of intellectual fluidity that the University is most proud of.” Of the Bead Industries collaboration, Matthew Nemerson, president of the Connecticut Technology Council said: “This level of science will work pure magic for Connecticut manufacturers. It’s a fairy tale come true.”

Bead Industries will show off its beta harvest Thursday, April 6th at the Eli Whitney Museum. A company spokesperson said: “Whitney’s forge shaped 19th Century American manufacturing. It is appropriate that we introduce this product, through which we will forge the future, on the Whitney site. Our products have always inspired creativity.” An exhibition of bead chain inventions will accompany this technical premiere.
More information.