States of Health: Visualizing Illness and Healing

The Being Human Festival 2019 of the Humanities Council will support three Princeton University Art Museum activities surrounding a new exhibition, States of Health: Visualizing Illness and Healing. The exhibition features over 80 globe-spanning works of art, from antiquity to the present—including paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, and works in mixed media—that collectively illuminate the role that art plays in shaping our perceptions and experiences of illness and healing. Being Human will cover the following:

4:30 pm: A gallery workshop will feature Dr. Kevin Liou, who is completing a fellowship in Integrative Medicine at Memorial Sloan Cancer Center and initiated the Integrated Clinical Arts Program at Brown University to further his longstanding interest in using museums and art to teach medicine. The audience will be limited to 20 invitees including pre-med students, lab workers, and MD/PhD candidates.

5:30 pm: The Princeton Chamber Music Society (PCMS) will play a concert called “Being Sound: Music, Madness, and Medicine,” which explores the multifaceted intersection of music and medicine. The performance, which spans six centuries of chamber music, will range from a musical parody of an 18th century surgery to contemporary works that have been integrated into clinical music therapy. Tickets are not required, but seating is limited. Up to 80 guests of any demographic may attend the concert, which ends at 6:30 pm, and the subsequent reception, which ends at 7:30 pm, all in the Princeton University Art Museum.

5:30 pm: Princeton University molecular biology graduate student Robert LeDesma will give an intimate tour of States of Health for up to 20 medical professionals from the Princeton Medical Center. As a scientist, as well as a student guide for the Museum and the research assistant for this exhibition, Robbie will afford a unique perspective into the parallels between visualizing disease in the sciences and the arts, along with the role that the arts can play in increasing empathy.

States of Health: Visualizing Illness and Healing is made possible by J. Bryan King, Class of 1993; the Princeton University Humanities Council, the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; and other generous donors.