Artists Help Us to Gain a Deeper Understanding of Death and Healing
Hyperallergic
By Ilene Dube
From Albrecht Dürer to LaToya Ruby Frazier, artists have for centuries depicted and reflected on health and illness.
PRINCETON, New Jersey — Lately, I’ve been starting my days with the daily e-mails of a neighbor, his meditations on coping with cancer and addiction, as well as the YouTube videos of a friend accepting the end of her life without intervention. “Cancer is nature’s way of taking care of my body,” writes my friend, who founded a program that treats addiction and other issues with a plant-based diet.
As we assume a greater role in the management and acceptance of our illnesses and dying, the emerging field of medical humanities is informing conversations around health crises. The Princeton University Art Museum has jumped into the fray with States of Health: Visualizing Illness and Healing.
An engaging selection of works by Leonora Carrington, Edvard Munch, Jackson Pollock, Gordon Parks, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Albrecht Dürer, and others come together to illuminate illness and healing in art. Experts in infectious diseases, disability, literature, medicine, contagion, psychology, and creative writing weigh in, in the form of short essays on the walls, responding to the 80 objects from antiquity to present day.
The exhibition explores the different ways ailments — such as the bubonic plague, mental illness, and the AIDS crisis — have been addressed. Molecular biology professor Bonnie L. Bassler, in her essay, points out that the “causes of disease do their work at the atomic and microscopic scales,” and we use words like witchcraft, the plague, consumption, dropsy to describe their power. […]
Among the more poignant works in a show filled with heart breakers is MacArthur Fellow LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Landscape of the Body (Epilepsy Test)” (2011). Frazier has documented hope and despair among working class families in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving steel town. This diptych of gelatin silver prints is not easy to look at — the flesh on the back of a figure, hooked up to monitors, is visible through her parted hospital gown, and in the image on the right are the ruins of a building. The woman in the printed hospital gown is Frazier’s mother, receiving treatment for epilepsy, and the ruined building is the UPMC Braddock Hospital, demolished in 2011. This facility, vital to the predominantly African American community, many of whom suffered from environmental toxins related to the steel mill, was replaced by one in an affluent Pittsburgh suburb. While documenting this inequity, Frazier said she felt the ground tremble like a convulsion similar to the seizures her mother suffered.
Courtesy of: Hyperallergic
