Laura Ferguson

Featured media

Laura Ferguson and Katie Grogan, eds., Art & Anatomy: Drawings

A book about my Art & Anatomy class at NYU School of Medicine. With 92 drawings by the med students, doctors and health professionals who gather in the Anatomy Lab to turn anatomy into art. | University of California Medical Humanities Press, 2018

“This book is an inspiration, a pleasure, and an education. It should be required reading for all students of anatomy, health professions educators, and anyone else interested in the intersections of art and science, beauty and biology.” – Louise Aronson, MD, MFA, author of A History of the Present Illness and Elderhood, Professor, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine

“In Art & Anatomy we see medical students not just memorizing anatomical structures, but really seeing the bodies that lie before them. This practice—slowing down, thinking deeply, looking closely—may be just as valuable to the education of these doctors-in-training as their burgeoning knowledge of anatomy will be. This is an important book that not only honors the beautiful artwork that the students produced, but which also should inspire other medical schools to pair creativity and analysis in the human anatomy lab.” 
– Christine Montross, MD, author of Body of Work; Associate Professor, Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University

"How to Draw a Human Heart" - directed by Emon Hassan for Narrative.ly
A short film about me and my Art & Anatomy class (from Narrative.ly’s series "Art in Strange Places"!) | “An introspective artist teaches med students and faculty to put down their scalpels and discover beauty in boxes of bones and body parts.” [The whole story in just 5 minutes.]
Watch it here

BLR (Bellevue Literary Review), Issue 39, Fall 2020, “Reading the Body” - cover art and featured art with artist’s statement (images also viewable here.)
"BLR (Bellevue Literary Review) is an independent literary journal that probes the nuances of our lives both in illness and in health.” 

Leonardo, June 2020, cover art and “Intimate Visions” article.
Leonardo is “the leading international peer-reviewed journal on the use of contemporary science and technology in the arts and music.”

Catherine Monahon and Elizabeth Jameson, “Intimate Visions: Representations of the Imperfect Body in the Age of Digital Medicine”
Leonardo | MIT Press Journals, June 2020
”The authors explore artists looking at the relationship between illness, identity, the brain and imagery produced by medical imaging technology … [with] specific works of artists impacted by diseases of the brain and spinal cord, specifically Laura Ferguson, Katherine Sherwood, Marilene Oliver, Kelly Hayden, Darian Goldin Stahl and Elizabeth Jameson.”

 

Darian Goldin Stahl, “Touching Viscera: Marilène Oliver and Laura Ferguson” 
Espace Art Actuel, themed issue “Transparence|Transparency,” Fall 2019
“It is evident that her position in the NYU Anatomy Lab gives [Ferguson] an unprecedented artistic perspective of medicalized bodies. Given her own history of medical intervention, she is profoundly aware of how the disabled body is understood by medicine as an object in need of fixing—a position commonly known as the ‘medical model of disability.’ As an artist, on the other hand, Ferguson understands the medicalized body as belonging to a subject in need of caring and durational consideration, which she performs by delicately drawing the anatomical structures of donated cadavers.”


Laura Ferguson, “Floating on inner seas”
Interalia Magazine is“dedicated to the interactions between the arts, sciences and consciousness, September 2018
"‘I draw myself, from the inside out, tuning in to sensory and kinesthetic perceptions and finding beauty in a curving spine.’ Laura Ferguson, artist in residence at NYU School of Medicine and art editor for the NYU Langone LitMed Database, writes about making her own body the subject of her art, and about the connections between pain and creativity.”

Katie Grogan and Laura Ferguson,  "Cutting Deep: The Transformative Power of Art in the Anatomy Lab"
Journal of Medical Humanities, September 21, 2018
Makes the case for “drawing as an active mode of learning which opens a creative space for participants to process the emotional complexities of cadaver dissection…. The anatomy lab can be the training ground for clinical detachment, but many U.S. medical schools are beginning to attend more closely to the emotional aspects of dissection. The authors maintain that the inherently expressive nature of drawing makes the Art & Anatomy course a novel and effective approach to this endeavor.” 

More videos, podcasts, media

ArtandAnatomy.com - website
Art & Anatomy: the book, the class, and the inspiration for more drawing in the context of medical eduction.

"Drawing the Human Heart" - narrated slideshow
My keynote presentation for the American Society of Bioethics + Humanities | "Laura talks about her journey as an artist … and how it brought her to the Anatomy Lab at NYU’s School of Medicine as Artist in Residence." [37 min.]
Watch it on LitMed Magazine

Laura Ferguson: Visualizing Inner Space" - video
A documentary about my work, including the only film of my floating colors process | directed by Peter Barton [15 mins.]
Watch it here or on Vimeo.com/14796770

“The Art of Medicine” - host Darlina Liu interviews Laura, on the Doctors Who Create podcast, episode #16  
https://soundcloud.com/doctorswhocreate

Books that reference my work:

Devan Stahl, Imaging and Imagining Illness: Becoming Whole in a Broken Body
“Medical imaging technologies can help diagnose and monitor patients' diseases, but they do not capture the lived experience of illness.” Medical historian/ethicist and MS patient] Devan Stahl and her artist/printmaker sister, Darian Goldin Stahl, "shed light on the meaning of illness and the impact medical imaging can have on our cultural imagination.” In the Foreword, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, describes my work: “These portraits create a sense of flesh that is at once both opaque and transparent … a feeling that the image is inhabited.” | Wipf and Stock, 2017

Alice Domurat Dreger, Ph.D., One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal
“The book calls into question assumptions about anatomy and normality, and transforms our understanding of how we are all intricately and inextricably joined" [from book jacket]. About my work, she writes, “Ferguson's autobiographical ‘Visible Skeleton’ series raises a radical question: can a scoliotic skeleton be physically painful and gorgeous at the same time? A shocking question like that has the power to help patients with scoliosis and other conditions begin to reject the social stigma assigned their bodies – begin to sort out the different kinds of pains and the options for addressing them.” | Harvard University Press, 2004

Bettyann Kevles, Naked To The Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century
"Kevles shows how the development of the X-ray and subsequent medical imaging technologies caused deep changes in how people thought about their bodies – manifested in the work of artists from Picasso to Francis Bacon,” and including my work, of which she says “Her images form bones, blood and flesh, floating free from pain.” | Rutgers University Press, Sloan Technology Series, 1997

Frances Larson, Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
“Drawing dead bodies necessitates a complicated emotional journey.… ‘You spend so much time communing with the object or the thing that you’re drawing,’ Laura Ferguson says, ‘that you come to know it in a way that’s much deeper than dissecting it or just looking at it in a book.’” | Liveright 2014

Books: cover art

Lynne Knight, The Bone Woman Mudlark, 2016

Heather Angier, Crooked Dancing Girl Press, 2012

Adam Pottle, Beautiful Mutants Caitlin Press, 2011

Ronald L. DeWald, M.D., ed., Spinal Deformities: The Comprehensive Text Thieme Medical Publishers, 2003