Art Embodied: project proposal

The impetus for creating this blog is a Global Independent Study Project (GLISP) I designed through Brown University. The project is a course I designed, titled "Art Embodied: Anatomy from an Arts Historical Perspective," sponsored by Brown's Visual Arts Department Chair Leslie Bostrom. The 'study' section of this blog will provide updates on the project and will serve as a space to share what I have learned. To learn more about the project itself, check out my proposal below:

Project Proposal: Art Embodied

In “Art Embodied: Anatomy from an Arts Historical Perspective,” I will focus on historical anatomical understanding and how it has influenced depictions of the human figure throughout art history. Each two-week time period will be themed around a distinct era in art history. The course will involve weekly site visits to art museums in Paris, as well as readings related to a specific historical era. Course readings will feature subjects such as anatomical understanding of the time and how artists of the era represented the human figure, with particular emphasis on anatomy.

Creation of artwork in response to readings and site visits will be the cornerstone of this course. A high-quality sketchbook, which I will bring to all of my site visits, will serve as a visual and written record of my interactions with artwork in the museums. At the end of each two weeks of study, I will create a final drawing inspired by the artworks I engaged in that timeframe. The culmination of each two-week’s work will be a blog post. Posts will feature: a reflection on the readings and information about select artworks from the site visits, select photographs of my sketchbook pages, a photograph of my final anatomical drawing, and an artists statement detailing how my final drawing is linked to anatomical representations created by artists during the featured era.

The academic legitimacy of this project stems from its emphasis on critical thinking. Each week I will conduct research and observation, but will also be challenged to internalize this information and respond to it creatively. The course will challenge me to engage with large amounts of visual and written input, search for threads of commonality across artworks to pick out broad themes, and creatively engage with these themes on a weekly basis.

My educational experience at Brown thus far has prepared me to explore the intersection of anatomy and art. As a premedical student and a visual arts concentrator, my coursework has spanned the arts and sciences. I am constantly grasping for ways to bring together the fields of art and medicine — two fields I argue are not as disparate as they may seem. This fall semester I passionately immersed myself in two courses bridging art and science explicitly.  ‘Communicating Science’, an animation course in the visual arts department taught by a RISD animation professor and a Brown neuroscience professor, explored how to visually depict and describe scientific concepts. ‘Artists and Scientists as Partners,’ examined the potential of art forms such as dance to improve the lives of individuals with Autism or Parkinson’s disease.  Both courses stressed discovering innovative ways to unite two very different modes of thinking— the linear versus the nonlinear, the logical versus the expressive. In regards to my coursework more broadly, my science courses provide me with the data synthesis and research skills to conduct this project, while my art courses have encouraged creative problem solving and strengthened my drawing skills. With a background that is both analytical and expressive, I feel prepared to conduct this GLISP, which draws broadly from skill sets in both the arts and sciences.

I am excited to continue my exploration of the intersection of art and medicine through ‘Art Embodied’, an academic exploration that will allow me to continue to search for platforms on which art and medicine can find common ground.  The GLISP will also allow me to approach the scientific field of anatomy from a visual, context-rich perspective distinct from the approach taken in my hard sciences classes at Brown.  In addition, the end results of this GLISP will include a body of work — a series of anatomical drawings — that will serve as a launching point for my visual arts honors thesis when I return to Brown fall of my senior year.

With its rich array of art museums, Paris offers the unique opportunity to conduct live observation of a vast collection of historical paintings. This course will take full advantage of the diverse of array of art museums in Paris, with site visits to the Louvre, the Cluny National Museum of the Middle Ages, the Museum of the Romantics, the National Museum of Eugene Delacroix, the Petit Palais Fine Arts Museum of Paris, the Rodin Museum, Musee D’Orsay, Musee de l’Orangerie,  the Pompidou Museum, the Picasso Museum and the Paris Museum of Modern Art.  Weekly site visits to such a comprehensive group of art collections would not be feasible in Providence.  Live sketching and direct observation of historical artworks in these eleven institutions will enrich and energize the project.

While much work has been done in narrating the history of anatomy, and much previous research has examined depictions of the human figure across eras of art history, this GLISP takes a unique perspective. I will examine the link between anatomical understanding and depictions of the human body in art, how this relationship has changed overtime, and how it is manifested in the art hanging from Parisian gallery walls today.