Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism – Mapping the Convergences of Art and Medicine in the British Empire

Image Credit: After Abraham James, The Torrid Zone, or, Blessings of Jamaica, 1800. The Wellcome Collection. Public Domain

Image Credit: John Bartholomew, British empire throughout the world exhibited in one view, 1850s. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. Public Domain

Art Hx

Illuminating the historical and ongoing entanglements of art, colonialism, race, and medicine

Art Hx—by tessellating various materials, research specialities, and methods via a unique digital platform—unravels the different modes by which visual imagery and medical history have, in combination, been accessory to racist and imperialist endeavors.

Recent Constellations

At Art Hx, Constellations bring images together to envisage their often elided or
undetectable thematic, visual, and material networks. Each Constellation relates to one of the project’s three frameworks: Cultivating Care, Pathologies of Difference, and Medicalized Space.

Pathologies of Difference

In the House of My Father

By Luke NaessensPhD Candidate, Princeton University and Art Hx Graduate Research[…]

Pathologies of Difference

Documentations of Medicinal Plants in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean

By Dr. Anna Reid Writer, curator and historian of art Art[…]

A still from Sarah Khan's 2022 digital short, curative spaces

Cultivating Care

Sarah Khurshid Khan, Curative Spaces, 2022

Sarah Khurshid Khan, Curative Spaces: African Indian Ocean world femmes, Marjane[…]