AGO SEMINARS: "Art Is Patient"

Art is Patient seminar series

People are complicated. Art is difficult. They’re both challenging: often opaque and multi-layered and hard to read. People and artworks might show up with their labels front-and-centre, but what do labels really tell us? As clinicians or as viewers, how do we approach and understand these layered beings as insightfully and respectfully as possible?

Art is Patient introduces learners to a series of steps to approach art in a museum as a means to explore the ways we encounter people in our clinics and offices. The course proposes that relating to art and to people in meaningful ways doesn’t require specialized background knowledge. Rather, it  requires our mindful, open-minded engagement.

The seminar series turns the Art Gallery of Ontario into a dynamic lab for visual literacy. In each of three linked sessions, we engage with one or two pieces of artwork with curiosity and humility. The art tells us what we need to know about seeing, witnessing and engaging in the context of care. The museum allows objects and images to clarify the professional/patient relationship in ways the clinic can’t, giving us space to question and understand our roles with one another, all without the usual pressures to know or perform or explain.
 

Activities:

• guided close observation of art

• group discussion and

• self-reflection via mark-making

Goals:

• Foster cognitive skills such as description and interpretation (and better understand the distinction between the two), critical thinking and metacognition

• Sharpen technical abilities such as close observation, diagnostic acumen, pattern recognition and the perception of non-verbal cues

• Deepen interpersonal skills with both patients and colleagues, such as collaboration, social awareness and cultural sensitivity

• Nurture humanistic qualities such as tolerance of ambiguity, curiosity, creativity and self-reflection

• Understand the role of embodied witnessing in the practice of medicine.

Seminar leader:
Eva-Marie Stern, RP, MA, Adjunct Faculty U of T Dept of Psychiatry, is an art therapist, a relational psychotherapist and educator. She co-founded WRAP (within the Trauma Therapy Program) at Women’s College Hospital in 1998. Her chapter, co-authored with Shelley Wall, “The Visible Curriculum”, appears in Health Humanities in Postgraduate Medical Education (Oxford U Press, 2018) and expands on how looking at and making art can vitalize learning in medicine. She is a Harvard Fellow in Art Museum-Based Health Professions Education.
 

Time and place
3 sessions in sequence:
3:00 to 5:00 on Wednesdays February 8, 15, 22, 2023
In person: Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St West, Toronto
 

Enrolment:
Open to all U of T Medical Students and Residents on a first-come, first-served basis.
There is no cost for participation but enrolment is limited for a small group experience.
BECAUSE SPACES ARE LIMITED, ATTENDANCE IS EXPECTED AT ALL THREE seminars/workshops.
No art experience is necessary.
Tickets are graciously provided by the AGO.
 

For more information and to register, please contact: emstern@artandmind.net and indicate your year of study and specialization