Americas Center on Science and Society (ACSS) exhibition and Brian Nissen, sculptor and artist, will be celebrating his new body of extraordinary work on the horseshoe crab: "Limulus: Visions of the Living Fossil," in the Media Information Center of the Graduate School of CUNY at 365 Fifth Avenue. Strongly influenced by the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mexico, where he has lived and worked extensively, he has lived and worked in New York since 1979. A Guggenheim fellow in 1980, he has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, The Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Carpenter Center at Harvard, and the Cooper Union and the Museo del Barrio in New York City.

His exploration of a prose poem of Octavio Paz, "The Obsidian Butterfly, " exhibited at the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, with which he published a conjectured codex: Itzpapalotl, was the beginning of his large scale development of a theme in different media and materials (relief paintings, sculpture, graphics, dance performance), that he then continued in his series Atlantis, Cacaxtla, Chinampas, and now Limulus. Of this exhibition Paz observed: "Rather than an exhibition of works of art, the exhibition itself was the work of art." In 1996, Nissen collaborated with Carlos Fuentes on a book called Voluptario.

As he explains his fascination with Limulus Polyphemus, this strange prehistoric creature that proliferates in the Middle Atlantic Coast -especially in estuary embayments- extending south of Florida into the Yucatan region of the Gulf of Mexico is in reality an ancestor of the spider family, and has not changed its form in over 200 million years. Seen from underneath without its shell, it resembles a scorpion. The strange body shell it casts off intact when molting, a simple elemental helmet shape outside, contains a remarkable baroque form inside. The remarkable series of art works Nissen has prepared, in bronzes and collages, will be exhibited starting on December. The exhibition coincides with IACERE-Americas Center scientist John Tanacredi's new book on the subject, Limulus in the Limelight.

There will be a program to open the exhibition on December 4, including a multidisciplinary panel, followed by a reception. This will celebrate the artistic expression of "Limulus a Living Fossil" and place - through this combined expression --Limulus in the Limelight.