March 15, 2023
Art Hx Artist-in-Residence Nate Lewis Connects with Princeton’s Special Collections and Discusses his Work
2022-2023 Art Hx Artist-in-Residence Nate Lewis recently visited Princeton’s Special Collections before discussing his work in conversation with A&A Ph.D. candidate Jessica Womack, who works as the Art Hx project manager.
To read about Lewis’s February 28 visit to Princeton and experience with the university’s special collections, read the full story by Kirstin Ohrt, Department of Art and Archaeology Communications Specialist, here.
October 31, 2022
PRESS RELEASE
2022-23 Art Hx Artist-in-Residence and Interpretive Fellows
Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism is pleased to announce the 2022-23 Art Hx Artist-in-Residence and Interpretive Fellows. This year, the Art Hx project team is joined by artist Nate Lewis, who will work with the team through a virtual residency. Four early-career scholars, Michaela Clark, Sadie Levy Gale, Chimwemwe Phiri, and Shelley Angelie Saggar, will also collaborate with the project team as members of the newest cohort of Art Hx Interpretive Fellows.
The Art Hx team invited the artist and writers to contribute to the project after their participation in the April 2022 curative / spaces symposium, and we are thrilled to continue learning from and with them through the second year of our residency and fellowship programs.
Art Hx 2022-23 Artist-in-Residence: Nate Lewis
During his time with Art Hx, artist Nate Lewis will host a virtual public program, hold a workshop for Princeton undergraduate students and a conversation with graduate students, and create a digital work in conversation with Art Hx research questions that will be shared on the project website. The Art Hx team is inspired by Lewis’s work—which weaves together history, medicine, diagnostic imaging, and aesthetics, important concerns for the project—as well as his previous experience as a nurse.
Based in New York City, Lewis explores history through patterns, textures, and rhythm, creating meditations of celebration and lamentations. He earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing from Virginia Commonwealth University, and he practiced critical-care nursing in DC-area hospitals for nine years.
His work has been exhibited at the California African American Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Yale Center for British Art; 21c Museum Hotels; with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services. Past residencies include Pioneer Works and Dieu Donne. Lewis’s work is in the public collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, and The University of Austin at Texas. His most recent solo exhibition, Tuning the Current, was on view at Fridman Gallery in New York City earlier this fall. The featured works raised “questions about the interrelatedness of physical movement, history and healing, particularly (but not only) in the context of African diasporic art and culture.” To learn more about Lewis’s work, visit his website: http://natelewisart.com/.
Art Hx 2022-23 Interpretive Fellows: Michaela Clark, Sadie Levy Gale, Chimwemwe Phiri, and Shelley Angelie Saggar
Interpretive Fellows, informed by their own research interests, questions, and methods, will author contributions, or “constellations,” for the project site. These constellations will bring several images and objects together to illuminate often ignored or erased thematic, material, and visual connections. The final constellations will relate to one of the three Art Hx frameworks: Cultivating Care, Medicalized Space, and Pathologies of Difference.
Michaela Clark is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), University of Manchester. Her ongoing doctoral project focuses on a 20th century collection of clinical surgery photographs held at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Pathology Learning Centre in South Africa.
Sadie Levy Gale is a Ph.D. candidate at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture as part of an AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Award with Bristol University and Historic England. Her research examines visual representations of empire, healthcare, and the built environment in England in the inter-war and post-war periods, using photographic archives as a key source.
Chimwemwe Phiri is a doctoral researcher in medical anthropology and visual history at Durham University. Her research examines the legacies of two medical photographic collections related to two former British colonial medical officers that are held in four UK-based archives; her PhD project explores histories of race, violence, the ethical dimensions of medical photography, questions of ownership, and the afterlives of archival material.
Shelley Angelie Saggar is a CHASE-funded Ph.D. researcher and museum worker based across the School of English and the Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies at the University of Kent. Her research examines contestations and reclamations of the museum in Native North American and Maori cultural texts. She also works as a collections researcher at the Science Museum, developing protocols for managing culturally-sensitive items.
About the Art Hx and the Artist-in-Residence/Interpretive Fellowship Programs
Founded in 2020 by Dr. Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton University, African American Studies and Art & Archaeology), Art Hx is a digital humanities research project that explores the interconnected nature of the development of medicine, constructions of race, and image-making across the former British Empire and the United States. Our project draws on historical materials from museum and archive collections around the world and centralizes their ongoing influence on our experiences and understandings of health, medicine, and race today.
Each year, the Art Hx team invites one artist for a residency and 3-4 other contributors for an Interpretive Fellowship. As Art Hx seeks to illuminate the connections between colonialism, racism, medicine, and art, the personal and professional experiences and expertise that these invited contributors bring to the project importantly challenge traditional historical narratives; they present stories that urge us to see colonial histories and take seriously how they linger, shaping our collective present.
The inaugural Art Hx Artist-in-Residence (2021-22) was Sarah K. Khan. Dr. Edna Bonhomme, Daniella Rose King, and Dr. Anna Reid comprised the first cohort of Interpretive Fellows. We are grateful for their generosity and care as they collaborated with us and shared their unique voices in their contributions to engage audiences and highlight the interconnectedness of art, colonialism, slavery, medicine, health, and healing via the Art Hx website. To view examples of the work they created during their time with Art Hx, see:
- Dr. Edna Bonhomme, More than an Image: Black Women Healers at the Helm of Modern Gynecology
- Sarah K. Khan, Curative Spaces
- Daniella Rose King, Embodied Entanglements I: The Master’s Tools
- Dr. Anna Reid, Documentations of medicinal plants in the eighteenth-century Caribbean
The 2022-23 Art Hx Artist-in-Residence and Interpretive Fellowship programs are supported by the Princeton University Council of the Humanities Magic Grant.
For any inquiries, email: arthxproject@gmail.com. Follow the project on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
