Conference Panels & Presentations
As a presenter, I make cross-disciplinary connections across contemporary art, health and the politics of embodiment.
Artist-in-Residence at an Academic Medical Center: Fusing Creativity, Connection and Wellbeing through Music
Paper Title
”Artist-in-Residence at an Academic Medical Center: Fusing Creativity, Connection and Wellbeing through Music”
Dates
September 2024
Role
Presenter
Conference
The Future of Music and Arts in Medicine and Health
Location
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany
This presentation details the creation of an Artist-in-Residence program (2019-present) with a percussionist and drum facilitator within the medical school and health sciences campus of an urban U.S. university. Three components of the program are discussed and analyzed. First, a regular selective course in drumming improvisation designed for preclinical medical students and intended to promote competencies in communication skills, teamwork and burnout mitigation. Second, an ongoing series of patient engagement workshops that use soothing sounds and musical collaboration to improve patient experience within the headache unit of the university’s hospital. Third, optional music enrichment activities, primarily for students, but also for patients, caregivers, and staff, to promote social connection and stress relief. Outcomes shared include analysis of student reflections and program evaluation of the selective course in drumming improvisation, as well as patient and staff feedback. The Artist-in-Residence model is presented as a multimodal strategy for delivering the benefits of arts-based teaching, learning and engagement in healthcare to various stakeholders across the academic medical center community, from trainees to patients.
A Novel For-Credit DEI Humanities Co-Curriculum
Paper Title
”A Novel For-Credit DEI Humanities Co-Curriculum”
Dates
May 2024
Role
Presenter
Conference
Association of American Medical Colleges Northeast Group on Educational Affairs 2024 Annual Conference - Cultivating Creativity and Collaboration: Unleashing Innovation in Medical Education
Location
NYU Langone Health, New York City
Medical educators have highlighted the role that the arts and humanities play in advancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) by supporting critical reflection on inequities and teaching advocacy. We adapted an existing co-curricular humanities program to include an optional focus in anti-racism in health (ARIH). Though racism as a social determinant of health is increasingly addressed in medical curricula, such inclusion often consists of a small number of didactic sessions, limiting students’ ability to reflect and evolve. Using the structure of our existing humanities program, we developed a process for students to participate further in DEI events while building community with a cohort of peers. Over two years, we offered 195 students participating in our program the option to choose the ARIH focus, which 25 students completed. All students attended eight humanities events from a yearlong calendar and submitted four written reflections. Events included an interprofessional story slam on anti-racism, faculty-led reading groups and workshops, and facilitated dialogues with community members.
Healing and the Museum I
Panel Title
Healing and the Museum
Dates
April 2024
Role
Panel Chair
Conference
Association for Art History Annual Conference
Location
University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
Paper Titles:
Sarah Richter (University of Vermont)
”Re-signifying Museums: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons' Immersive Performances and the Restoration of African Diasporic Heritage”Amanda Cachia (University of Houston)
”Bodies Are Not Archival: Disability, Decolonization and Hospital Aesthetics”Kirsten Lloyd (The University of Edinburgh)
”Our Bodies are Not the Problem: Healthcare Activism, Feminism and the Museum”Nicola Guy (Goldsmiths, University of London)
”I’m Sorry It’s Late, But It Was Just Another Fucking Thing to Do”
Since the 1960s, the prevailing biomedical definition of health—an understanding of wellness and illness framed in terms of physical disease and its presence/absence—has been called into question. A broader definition acknowledges the entanglements of body, psyche and society, emphasizing social and cultural determinants of health including marginalization.
Museums have long been at the center of debates over how institutions perpetuate such harms or offer opportunities for remediation—an ambivalence seen in ongoing efforts to decolonize museums alongside the emergence of the cultural prescription (a museum visit recommended by a health care provider). Through emergent practices of contemporary art informed by lineages of institutional critique and social practice from the 1990s—but also through novel forms of engagement extending across art and public health—museums are being reimagined as places of care.
Inspired by projects including artist Grace Ndiritu’s Healing the Museum and curator Clémentine Deliss’s Metabolic Museum, this panel invites consideration of how artists, curators, educators and publics are reconfiguring museums in relationship to health and wellness. Proposal topics may include but are not limited to: the development of healing interventions by artists in museums; the convergence of clinic and art gallery or studio spaces; efforts to re-signify and repair museum collections and archives; advocacy related to health justice and access through art-making, exhibitions or public engagement; and institutional resistance to change and virtue signaling.
Methodological approaches from curatorial, artistic and art historical perspectives, and beyond, were welcome, as were papers addressing inter/transnational, European and U.K. contexts.
Rupturing ‘White Time’ in the Museum: When Contemporary Artists Invoke Ancestors to Repair Colonial Ontologies
Session Title
”Aesthetic Intervention and Institutional Critique”
Dates
October 2023
Role
Presenter
Conference
Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, ASAP/14: Arts of Fugitivity
Location
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
Museums, and their roots in the ethnographic and anthropological study of cultures, have been roundly implicated in the maintenance of colonial knowledge systems—particularly what Sylvia Wynter terms the overrepresentation of a white, Eurocentric, capitalist definition of the human. Since the 1990s, artists have sought to uncover and illuminate implicit coloniality in museums through institutional critique, in projects such as Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992-1993).
This paper explores how, more recently, artists have framed their work in this critical lineage as healing, repairing and reconfiguring museums, highlighting the museum as an ongoing site of wounding, both historical and present. This framing extends the work of the artist from critique to care—a process geared less to easily rehabilitating museums, or to making those invested in museums feel better, and more toward posing unsettling questions about how museums cause and perpetuate harm and how such institutions require a depth of healing that may be impossible to achieve.
Sound Health, Sonic Cosmologies: Decolonizing the Biomedical in the Work of Guadalupe Maravilla and Milford Graves
Paper Title
”Sound Health, Sonic Cosmologies: Decolonizing the Biomedical in the Work of Guadalupe Maravilla and Milford Graves”
Dates
March 2023
Role
Presenter
Conference
Heath Humanities Consortium Annual Conference
Location
Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio
This presentation focuses on two artists—Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976 in San Salvador, lives and works in Brooklyn) and Milford Graves (b. 1941-d. 2021, Queens, New York)—whose artmaking has worked to imagine new medicines.
In response to life-changing experiences of illness, both Maravilla and Graves developed complex intermedia practices that bridge sculpture, installation, performance, community practice and, most importantly, sound as a mechanism of healing, repair, and change. For more than 20 years, Graves studied the quality and variation of human heart sounds in conjunction with his practice as a pioneering free jazz percussionist. He visualized his findings and research process in animations and sculptural installations and developed experimental therapies to correct heart rhythm irregularities, using himself as a research subject.
Following his treatment for colon cancer, Maravilla developed a practice facilitating sound baths and other forms of mutual aid with groups of undocumented immigrants to the U.S., as well as with public audiences in art museums.
This presentation brings together the work of Graves and Maravilla as efforts to decolonize medicine and trouble the implicit whiteness of its institutions, knowledge paradigms and assumptions about relationships between body, mind and society.