Where Is the Art in Bio Art? School of Visual Arts, Flatiron Gallery, 133/141 West 21st Street, Manhattan. Through Oct. 18; reception at 6 p.m. Oct. 1. Free.

When Shane Boddington was growing up in rural Zimbabwe, he remembers craving an orange to quench his thirst. Now he is trying to splice a citrus gene into a tobacco plant to create a transgenic hybrid that smells like an orange. Mr. Boddington is not a biologist, however: He is an art student at the School of Visual Arts, whose Bio Art Lab was founded in 2011 to help young artists to put down their brushes and work with plants, animals and microbes using techniques like tissue engineering and cloning. At this show, one student will project colorized videos of wiggling ants to show the complexity of the gestural language they use to communicate. Another student has built a machine that makes entrancing mounds of glowing bubbles using a compound found in bioluminescent algae. There are also works from faculty members: Brandon Ballengée will show a skate fish preserved with a 19th-century technique that reveals its inner structure, and the lab’s director, Suzanne Anker, will contribute a 3-D replica of an egg in a petri dish with a dead insect. The purpose of bio art is to “demystify science and turn it into raw material for the practice of art,” Ms. Anker said — art that questions “what it means to be human at a time when technologies are changing how we reproduce, grow food and make drugs.”

Science Inspires Art: The Brain. New York Hall of Science, Queens. Opens Oct. 11. Adults $11, children and seniors $8.

This art exhibition offers some new ways of looking at that three-pound hunk of jelly in your skull. Some do it with humor: a mock-infographic that shows a brain hinged open to reveal dozens of tiny people scurrying about, and an elegantly staged photograph of a small brain on a dinner plate with serving spoons. Some offer neural self-portraits, like the artist with multiple sclerosis who paints Technicolor versions of her brain scans on silk, and the artist who gives an unsettling depiction of the white “aura” that appears in her field of vision before a migraine headache. Of the 42 works selected by a gallery director and a neuroscientist, most were from artists, “perhaps because entries from scientists tend to be too didactic,” said Cynthia Pannucci, the founder and director of Art & Science Collaborations Inc., who organized the exhibition. Among the most moving, however, were those that simply show the anatomy, such as “Cortical Columns,” a haunting panel by the neuroscientist-turned-painter Greg Dunn, who uses gold and silver powders, ink and dye to render nerve cells in all their branchiness, like saplings waiting for winter.