How I Landed up an Artist in Residence
“How did you land up being the Artist in Residence at a medical school?” is the question I get all the time. It seems so unbelievable to everyone that the same guy who wrote and illustrated a children’s book about cats titled “The Butt Hello” could have anything to add to a discussion at a bid deal medical school.
It seems like such a logical outcome when I look at all the different aspects of my life and how they all fit together. All those stays in the hospital stays, the lady with the art cart, drawing in my hospital bed, the ease I feel in a hospital, it really was a direct line from the disappointment my parents felt when I said I wanted to go to be an artist to making my way to my position at UCLA.
Being born with Gaucher Disease, a rare genetic illness, and living through multiple childhood hospital stays and treatment there was really only one choice. I spent years painting pain, painting loneliness, painting fatigue, and I got really good at it. I showed work from coast to coast. Gaucher had provided me a never-ending source of artistic motivation.
Pain as a subject suited me, and though I might not have sold a lot of my contorted skeletons, or angry figure paintings, I got good press and my paintings were getting shown.
Other than my failing health, everything was going well. That is until stupid old western medicine butted in and came up with a treatment to end my pains and extended my life expectancy to that of a normal person. In a single biotech miracle some faceless pharma company stripped me of my artistic direction and left me doing painting about that were no longer about suffering or angst, but love and happiness. It was enough to drive a healthy guy into depression.
I spent a year or two in artistic purgatory with no real vision until one night I met a lovely woman who was using a wheel chair. She was sporting a long scar on her back that she showed off proudly in a backless dress. Her name was Joy and she was a joy. A real human homonym. We discussed art and our changing life situations. How at that point we were moving in seemingly different directions. I was getting more active, and she, more confined. The interesting thing was that she was actually expanding her life. She was cast on a TV show and started working with a dance company to add rolling to their vocabulary of standard dance moves. She told me that although I was now healthy I should still be doing work about health and mobility because it was all still part of me.
I mulled that over for a bit, and because she was really beautiful, I thought she might be right. I called her that night and asked if I could make a contact print of her scar as a way to tell her story. So I showed up at her house a few hours later with ink, roller and paper and made the first print in my Scarred for Life series. I long blue imprint that clearly showed incision, stitching and the unnatural bend in Joy’s back where it had been broken.
At the first opportunity I showed Joy’s scar along with those of two other people. The reaction was unexpected. Gallery goers, normally only interested in cheese squares and wine lined up to discuss the print as well as tell me of their scars. I heard stories of accidents, operations and violence. People unbuttoned shirts and pulled down pants, they practically undressed in the gallery while giving me details of their strength and survival, all the while pointing to their scars. It was like nothing I had experienced. I came to realize that there was a BIG need for scar victims; even those considered done with their recoveries to tell their stories to complete their healing. They needed recognition of their struggles, and survival. They wanted their hip replacement to be more epic than the hip replacement of their office worker chums and they wanted everyone to know it.
For the next 12 years I collected scars, and I collected stories, and made prints. I heard tales of operations and recovery, of organs removed and replaced, arms and legs lost to nature and autos, and all the time I learned that the people that landed up in my studio were not defined by their symptoms, they were an amalgam of pre and post scar experiences.
I listened to my scar models’ histories, I heard about their medical care and about doctors who were fantastic with a blade, yet fantastically bad with their bedside manor.
I thought of my own medical care and the doctor, a wiz at sports medicine and joint replacement, who brought a group of med students into my room to show them “his scars” a result of a my bi-lateral hip replacement. He was excited to show them how neatly “his scars” had turned out because he did such a skillful job. I know it was just semantics but it was on my new hip, and it was my skin so I sort of thought of it as my scar, however he took ownership.
There was the time my hospital room was changed from one side of building to another. When I asked the nurse why I was moved she said the doctor thought I would like to see the golf course next door. I had never played golf and could not have cared less… and I wasn’t asked.
With my mixture of personal stories, first hand accounts, and a love of art, I thought, what can I do with all this to change the doctor/patient discussion? Could I get doctors to see their patients as I did, people with unfolding stories accentuated by treatment or trauma that kept unfolding years after treatment might have finished.
I thought if I could get to the students early, when they were still picking specialties, I might be able to make a change in how they looked at their patients.
I came up with an idea, bring art by patient-artists into the medical school and tie their work to what was being studied that quarter. For example, if the students were looking at the respiratory system I might find an artist with Asthma. Lupus would cover neurological; a germophobe artist could cover many bases. Shows on back pain, cancer, migraines, dementia and adult disabilities followed. I’d give them gallery shows and arrange a Q & A with the students and direct the artists to explain how their medical conditions motivated them to make art. How being under medical care made them full, well rounded creative people.
It took 6 months to get past the secretary at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine. She was formidable. Time after time in her thick Jamaican accent she stated the obvious… that I was calling the medical school and not the art school. She seemed totally confused by my repeated calls. I was rebuffed repeatedly.
I refused to be defeated and kept calling. One day, to my luck, she had a cold. My call was forwarded on to an assistant to the assistant dean of education. I told him my idea of a patient-artist gallery as a learning tool for the school and within 20 minutes I had an appointment for the next day to come in and pitch my program.
Five years later, after 19 shows featuring 23 artists and garnering fantastic press, what have I accomplished? As an artist and curator I have given a lot of artists a showplace for work that normally would be hidden. The interesting thing about art is that it is generally accepted that art should be about something… until it is. Then people want to see a sunset. Work about cancer, bipolar disorder and electro shock therapy, no matter now beautiful, generally does not get shown. I’ve created a venue for art with a strong personal medical narrative.
Then there are the medical students. Did I reach my goal of getting them to think differently about their future patients? I know medical schools love studies and I haven’t done a study, and I have no definitive proof and no double blind tests, but I would say, “Yes”. The artist lectures have been a hit and tying creativity to medical ailments seems to hit a cord with the students that just having and actor play a patient, or having a patient simply speak about their life does not.
Dominic Quagliozzi, an artist with CF creates artwork about his repeated hospital stays actually using his hospital time to make new work about his ordeal. His work expresses the boring routine of repeated hospitalizations. During his talk you could have heard a pin drop as he explained, and showed in his paintings, what it was like to live life on a waiting list for new lungs. Susan Trackman, an MS patient talked about loosing control of your life while showing the intricate patterns she makes from all her spent medical vials. “The only control I have over me medical life is what patterns I make with all the junk it generates”.
Art has kept me sane during my life with Gaucher and it has given others insight into what I go through. It has works for me and I know it works for others, and I know that compelling art can tell new doctors a lot about the conditions they will be treating
My long-term goal is to expand my program to other medical schools. There is no reason these shows can’t travel from school to school with matching educational materials. I’ve recently joined up with Dr. Simi Rahman at USC Medical School to add a bit of medical legitimacy to my project. We have started www.artandmed.com with a full list of talks and workshops and interviews with artists-patients being added all the time.
The other question I get is, “Are you doing art therapy?” My answer, “NO. I do the opposite of art therapy”. My patient-artists are already self-actualized and self-treating. This I all about the future doctors.
Since 2017 I have held the position of Artist in Residence at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.. Here I greatly expanded what I was doing at UCLA. I took over the Monkey Gallery. That isn't it's real name. But the Hoyt Gallery was, when I arrives at USC, used mostly for the doctors to hang their monkey photos taken in Costa Rica on their many vacations. After some political back and forth the gallery is now is mine to curate in ways the strengthen the core curriculum
It seems like such a logical outcome when I look at all the different aspects of my life and how they all fit together. All those stays in the hospital stays, the lady with the art cart, drawing in my hospital bed, the ease I feel in a hospital, it really was a direct line from the disappointment my parents felt when I said I wanted to go to be an artist to making my way to my position at UCLA.
Being born with Gaucher Disease, a rare genetic illness, and living through multiple childhood hospital stays and treatment there was really only one choice. I spent years painting pain, painting loneliness, painting fatigue, and I got really good at it. I showed work from coast to coast. Gaucher had provided me a never-ending source of artistic motivation.
Pain as a subject suited me, and though I might not have sold a lot of my contorted skeletons, or angry figure paintings, I got good press and my paintings were getting shown.
Other than my failing health, everything was going well. That is until stupid old western medicine butted in and came up with a treatment to end my pains and extended my life expectancy to that of a normal person. In a single biotech miracle some faceless pharma company stripped me of my artistic direction and left me doing painting about that were no longer about suffering or angst, but love and happiness. It was enough to drive a healthy guy into depression.
I spent a year or two in artistic purgatory with no real vision until one night I met a lovely woman who was using a wheel chair. She was sporting a long scar on her back that she showed off proudly in a backless dress. Her name was Joy and she was a joy. A real human homonym. We discussed art and our changing life situations. How at that point we were moving in seemingly different directions. I was getting more active, and she, more confined. The interesting thing was that she was actually expanding her life. She was cast on a TV show and started working with a dance company to add rolling to their vocabulary of standard dance moves. She told me that although I was now healthy I should still be doing work about health and mobility because it was all still part of me.
I mulled that over for a bit, and because she was really beautiful, I thought she might be right. I called her that night and asked if I could make a contact print of her scar as a way to tell her story. So I showed up at her house a few hours later with ink, roller and paper and made the first print in my Scarred for Life series. I long blue imprint that clearly showed incision, stitching and the unnatural bend in Joy’s back where it had been broken.
At the first opportunity I showed Joy’s scar along with those of two other people. The reaction was unexpected. Gallery goers, normally only interested in cheese squares and wine lined up to discuss the print as well as tell me of their scars. I heard stories of accidents, operations and violence. People unbuttoned shirts and pulled down pants, they practically undressed in the gallery while giving me details of their strength and survival, all the while pointing to their scars. It was like nothing I had experienced. I came to realize that there was a BIG need for scar victims; even those considered done with their recoveries to tell their stories to complete their healing. They needed recognition of their struggles, and survival. They wanted their hip replacement to be more epic than the hip replacement of their office worker chums and they wanted everyone to know it.
For the next 12 years I collected scars, and I collected stories, and made prints. I heard tales of operations and recovery, of organs removed and replaced, arms and legs lost to nature and autos, and all the time I learned that the people that landed up in my studio were not defined by their symptoms, they were an amalgam of pre and post scar experiences.
I listened to my scar models’ histories, I heard about their medical care and about doctors who were fantastic with a blade, yet fantastically bad with their bedside manor.
I thought of my own medical care and the doctor, a wiz at sports medicine and joint replacement, who brought a group of med students into my room to show them “his scars” a result of a my bi-lateral hip replacement. He was excited to show them how neatly “his scars” had turned out because he did such a skillful job. I know it was just semantics but it was on my new hip, and it was my skin so I sort of thought of it as my scar, however he took ownership.
There was the time my hospital room was changed from one side of building to another. When I asked the nurse why I was moved she said the doctor thought I would like to see the golf course next door. I had never played golf and could not have cared less… and I wasn’t asked.
With my mixture of personal stories, first hand accounts, and a love of art, I thought, what can I do with all this to change the doctor/patient discussion? Could I get doctors to see their patients as I did, people with unfolding stories accentuated by treatment or trauma that kept unfolding years after treatment might have finished.
I thought if I could get to the students early, when they were still picking specialties, I might be able to make a change in how they looked at their patients.
I came up with an idea, bring art by patient-artists into the medical school and tie their work to what was being studied that quarter. For example, if the students were looking at the respiratory system I might find an artist with Asthma. Lupus would cover neurological; a germophobe artist could cover many bases. Shows on back pain, cancer, migraines, dementia and adult disabilities followed. I’d give them gallery shows and arrange a Q & A with the students and direct the artists to explain how their medical conditions motivated them to make art. How being under medical care made them full, well rounded creative people.
It took 6 months to get past the secretary at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine. She was formidable. Time after time in her thick Jamaican accent she stated the obvious… that I was calling the medical school and not the art school. She seemed totally confused by my repeated calls. I was rebuffed repeatedly.
I refused to be defeated and kept calling. One day, to my luck, she had a cold. My call was forwarded on to an assistant to the assistant dean of education. I told him my idea of a patient-artist gallery as a learning tool for the school and within 20 minutes I had an appointment for the next day to come in and pitch my program.
Five years later, after 19 shows featuring 23 artists and garnering fantastic press, what have I accomplished? As an artist and curator I have given a lot of artists a showplace for work that normally would be hidden. The interesting thing about art is that it is generally accepted that art should be about something… until it is. Then people want to see a sunset. Work about cancer, bipolar disorder and electro shock therapy, no matter now beautiful, generally does not get shown. I’ve created a venue for art with a strong personal medical narrative.
Then there are the medical students. Did I reach my goal of getting them to think differently about their future patients? I know medical schools love studies and I haven’t done a study, and I have no definitive proof and no double blind tests, but I would say, “Yes”. The artist lectures have been a hit and tying creativity to medical ailments seems to hit a cord with the students that just having and actor play a patient, or having a patient simply speak about their life does not.
Dominic Quagliozzi, an artist with CF creates artwork about his repeated hospital stays actually using his hospital time to make new work about his ordeal. His work expresses the boring routine of repeated hospitalizations. During his talk you could have heard a pin drop as he explained, and showed in his paintings, what it was like to live life on a waiting list for new lungs. Susan Trackman, an MS patient talked about loosing control of your life while showing the intricate patterns she makes from all her spent medical vials. “The only control I have over me medical life is what patterns I make with all the junk it generates”.
Art has kept me sane during my life with Gaucher and it has given others insight into what I go through. It has works for me and I know it works for others, and I know that compelling art can tell new doctors a lot about the conditions they will be treating
My long-term goal is to expand my program to other medical schools. There is no reason these shows can’t travel from school to school with matching educational materials. I’ve recently joined up with Dr. Simi Rahman at USC Medical School to add a bit of medical legitimacy to my project. We have started www.artandmed.com with a full list of talks and workshops and interviews with artists-patients being added all the time.
The other question I get is, “Are you doing art therapy?” My answer, “NO. I do the opposite of art therapy”. My patient-artists are already self-actualized and self-treating. This I all about the future doctors.
Since 2017 I have held the position of Artist in Residence at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.. Here I greatly expanded what I was doing at UCLA. I took over the Monkey Gallery. That isn't it's real name. But the Hoyt Gallery was, when I arrives at USC, used mostly for the doctors to hang their monkey photos taken in Costa Rica on their many vacations. After some political back and forth the gallery is now is mine to curate in ways the strengthen the core curriculum