Seeing in Art and Medicine: A medical humanities exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums

The Seeing in Art and Medicine exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums.

In fall 2023, my colleague Laura Muir and I had the pleasure of curating Seeing in Art and Medicine at the Harvard Art Museums, which we believe to be the first medical humanities exhibition anywhere. It is also the museums’ first exhibition based on a teaching collaboration, underscoring our broader commitment to interdisciplinary learning.

The exhibition is based on the museums’ flagship multi-visit medical humanities program, Seeing in Art and Medical Imaging (SAMI), which is now in its sixth year. SAMI welcomes a cohort of residents in the Joint Program in Nuclear Medicine and Diagnostic Radiology at Brigham & Women’s Hospital to the museums to explore feelings, beliefs and opinions about work and life through art. The program is organized into seven sessions each year, centering on the themes of narrative, objectivity, embodiment, empathy, power, ambiguity, and care. Residents approach these themes through close-looking and active learning exercises with a diverse range of works from the museums’ permanent collection. SAMI began as a collaboration between Hyewon Hyun, a nuclear medicine physician and radiologist in the Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging at Brigham who is also Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School, and our former Harvard Art Museums colleague David Odo (now Director of the Georgia Museum of Art). I have been teaching for this program for the past five years in partnership with Hyewon and David.

Imaging physicians are great partners for this program because they spend their working lives looking at images—so we have much in common, and a lot to learn from each other. The museum environment allows residents to slow down and reflect on things they often don’t have the time, invitation, or headspace to do at the hospital. By removing them momentarily from the routines and hierarchies of their workplace, we give them space to utilize the same skills that they are honing each day with different responsibilities and implications.

Hyewon Hyun and colleagues from Brigham & Women’s Hospital discuss a photograph at the Harvard Art Museums.

Imaging physicians, depending on their sub-specializations and practice settings, may not interface directly with the patients whose bodies they examine through medical images. At the museums they are given the time and opportunity to develop their interpersonal and communication skills, discuss the issues and challenges of their profession, and make room for the emotions both they and their patients may experience in the clinical setting.

Residents in the SAMI program examine a self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh at the Harvard Art Museums.

The program brings the imaging physicians out of the clinical setting for SAMI sessions, but we also visit their work site on occasion. Through this collaboration, we get to know each other and how we work. Among other things, participants report that their time at the museums encourages them to rediscover human connections with their patients and revisit initial assumptions that they may not have been conscious of before.

Jen (left) and Laura (right) visit Hyewon (center) at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

The exhibition surfaces the past five years of work from the SAMI program. All of the objects in the show have been used in the program, and visitors are invited to consider some of the same topics and questions as the residents, to get us all thinking about how the program’s themes play out in our own lives and work. Seeing in Art and Medicine is designed to engage visitors with active learning prompts, including conversation starters, writing prompts, and drawing exercises appearing in many of the labels. Extra seating encourages visitors to linger, and the activity stations attached to them—with clipboards, pads of paper, and pencils—invite them to step into the shoes of program participants.

The label for a colossal wooden sculptural hand, which includes four drawing prompts that relate to perspective-taking, and various views of the hand.

Visitors are invited to extend the exhibition’s medical humanities lens out into the permanent galleries, with a takeaway card including three further artworks we have used in the SAMI program. A further extension of this lens is provided through the exhibition’s programming: a series of gallery talks, tours, Materials Lab workshops, and a film screening and conversation with artist Dario Robleto, whose portfolio The First Time, the Heart (A Portrait of Life 1854-1913) is on view in Seeing in Art and Medicine.

Harvard Medical School student William Shen gives a gallery talk in the Seeing in Art and Medicine exhibition with Annette Lemieux’s Available Portrait Colors, before leading a Materials Lab workshop on mixing paints to represent diverse skin tones.

This exhibition was a joy to curate. Every element allows us to share more of the on-the-ground work of a key curricular and community partnership, which those who aren’t in the SAMI program don’t usually get to see. Interdisciplinarity is at the core of everything I do at the Harvard Art Museums, but this project made me think even harder than usual about how to translate themes and questions across fields. At first I felt I would need to convince visitors that they don’t need to be a medical professional to “get” it, but the themes of the SAMI program center human-to-human relationships that we can all relate to, and they really do bridge those divides.

Seeing in Art and Medicineis on view until December 30, 2023. Admission to the Harvard Art Museums is free for everyone; the museums are open Tuesday through Sunday from 10am-5pm. The exhibition description, object list, and programs can be found here.

Jen Thum, Associate Director of Academic Engagement and Campus Partnerships and Research Curator