The Visual Arts and Graphic Medicine In Medical Education
Society of Illustrators
September 20, 2022 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
The incorporation of arts/humanities education is a growing trend in the training of healthcare professionals. Many medical schools are offering arts and humanities elective courses and opportunities for deeper engagement within these areas. This panel (of physicians, artists, students, cartoonists, and educators) will explore the clinical, interpersonal, professional, and practice-based skill benefits of these interdisciplinary arts programs. They will describe their roles in arts-based medical education, share their creative work, and investigate the influence of the artist on medical culture.
BLR (Bellevue Literary Review), Issue 39 Fall 2020, “Reading the Body”
My work is featured on the cover of the new issue, and in the Artist Statement & Featured Art inside. (The images are best seen in the print issue, but you can also view them here.)
"BLR (Bellevue Literary Review) is an independent literary journal that probes the nuances of our lives both in illness and in health.”
Coming to Know: an artist investigates her own unusual anatomy
My Art and Medicine Talk for the USC (University of Southern California) Keck School of Medicine HEAL Program was held via Zoom on November 20, 2020 - and is now available for viewing at
https://sites.usc.edu/heal/2020/10/23/coming-to-know-an-artist-investigates-her-own-unusual-anatomy-works-by-laura-ferguson/
In conversation with Ted Mayer, Artist in Residence, and Mark J. Spoonamore, MD, Associate Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery
Moderated by Dr. Pamela Schaff, Director of the HEAL Program
Leonardo cover art and Intimate Visions article
I’m excited to see my work on the cover of Leonardo, and featured in this important article.
Leonardo is “the leading international peer-reviewed journal on the use of contemporary science and technology in the arts and music and, increasingly, the application and influence of the arts and humanities on science and technology.”
Intimate Visions: Representations of the Imperfect Body in the Age of Digital Medicine
Catherine Monahon and Elizabeth Jameson
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.
June 2020 issue
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/leon_a_01745
Touching Viscera: Marilène Oliver and Laura Ferguson, by Darian Goldin Stahl, in Espace Art Actuel
By joining medically imaged viscera, the bodies’ surface, and a sense of touch, both artists prove a comforting hand is necessary to reverse the medical gaze and begin the process of healing. … taking medical scans outside of the clinical context and into the gallery promises to show us much more than just anatomy: the greater context, purpose, and meaning of our experiences with medicine.
Espace Art Actuel - Transparence/Transparency
no. 123, fall 2019
https://espaceartactuel.com/en/123-fall-2019/
What’s on the drawing board
Updating this site
Welcome to my newly updated website! it’s been the project of this summer of 2019. After so many years of making art and writing about it, it was fun to shape it as a narrative, putting words and pictures together to tell the story, with a large selection of images to choose from.
Some features that are new: a searchable database of all the artworks (on the Available art page, under Contact), and On the drawing board, where you can follow my process as new artwork takes shape (slowly!).
More news to come soon – including the launch of ArtandAnatomy.com, a new website that will focus on my Art & Anatomy class at NYU School of Medicine.
[posted 9/5/19]
Doctors Who Create Podcast interview
“The Art of Medicine” - episode #16 on the Doctors Who Create podcast https://soundcloud.com/doctorswhocreate
Doctors Who Create is a website (http://www.doctorswhocreate.com) with a linked podcast that asks the question: how do we encourage medical culture to embrace creativity? A great question and a worthy goal! I was honored to be interviewed for their podcast episode “The Art of Medicine.” The excellent interviewer was Darlina Liu, a med student at NYU School of Medicine who took my Art & Anatomy drawing class in 2017. Darlina also produced episode #17, on Medicine & Dance, which features another former Art & Anatomy student, Marleigh Stern. It’s full of inspiring ideas about the importance of movement and the value of communcating without the need for words.
[posted 9/16/19]
Art & Anatomy: Drawings selected for the 2019 Summer Reading List for Compassionate Clinicians
From the Gold Humanism Foundation: “Each summer, we compile a list of intriguing new books that might help strengthen clinicians’ commitment to compassionate care of both patients and themselves.” This summer their list of “10 thought-provoking reads” includes Art & Anatomy: Drawings: “In this book, we see medical students, physicians, and others not only memorizing complex anatomy, but also celebrating the uniqueness of the human body.”
https://www.gold-foundation.org/newsroom/blog/2019-summer-reading-for-compassionate-clinicians/
[posted 9/1/19]
“Floating on inner seas” published in Interalia Magazine
Water – and, more broadly, floating, fluidity, and flow – proved to be a perfect theme for bringing together many aspects of my work: from my floating colors art-making process, to the pleasure of floating free from gravity, to the fluid milieu intérieur that bathes all the cells of our bodies, to a new theory about cerebrospinal fluid as a cause of scoliosis, in “Floating on inner seas.”
Interalia is a magazine “dedicated to the interactions between the arts, sciences and consciousness.” The invitation to contribute to their issue on “Interconnecting Water” gave me a chance to pursue ideas I focused on in the SciArt Center’s recent “Submerged” show. The magazine’s format allowed me to bring words and images together in a way that I hope enhances both.
[Originally posted 9/27/18. Excerpts from “Floating on inner seas” became the basis for my Narrative of the body on this website.]
