Avnet’s Senior Vice President of Global Operations Beth McMullen recently joined the Board of Trustees for the Phoenix Art Museum. She combined her passion for science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) education by becoming a trustee at the largest art museum in the southwestern United States, which draws as many as 300,000 visitors each year.
As a trustee, Beth will help guide, advise and oversee museum operations. She also serves as a member of the board’s development committee.
In addition to becoming a museum trustee, Beth connected Avnet Cares for a sponsorship opportunity for a Phoenix Art Museum exhibit focused on STEM and the environment. Avnet Cares is the company’s philanthropy and volunteer program which focuses on themes of STEM, environment and communities in crisis.
The exhibit artist, Charles Gaines, is known for converting images and text-based documents into numerical structures, musical notations and other systems of mathematical symbology systems.
This special engagement exhibition includes Gaines’ most recent series, Numbers and Trees (Arizona Series), 2022-2023. This series was created with the desert environment in mind as it focuses on the native cottonwood trees of Southern Arizona. Using an analog translation system, Gaines blends media by running through an analog system that reduces the paintings to color coordinated plots of paint on a grid. Multiple colored grids are layered to create a raised image that maps each tree canopy. The final effect is a pixilated image overlaying the original photograph to blend natural and technological worlds.
“When you get up close to the paintings, all you see is boxes with numbers in them,” said Beth. “But when you step back, you see multidimensional trees—it’s truly a fascinating blend of math and art.”
The paintings are presented in conversation with Greenhouse, a massive sculptural enclosure paired with adjacent monitors to track historic and real-time temperature and weather patterns influenced by human-caused climate change. In response to shifting weather patterns tracked by the monitors, “weather” conditions inside the chamber shift throughout the day, filling with windstorms, colored smoke and vapors.
The exhibit runs through July 20, 2025 at the Phoenix Art Museum.