Lectures in Art History: Tanya Sheehan, Colby College

Art, Health and Equity Series

“Communities of Care: Charles Alston, Jacob Lawrence and the Murals of Harlem Hospital”

When Jacob Lawrence first painted an image of Harlem Hospital in 1937, Harlem’s largest public health care facility was teaming with artists hired by the federal government and working under the supervision of Lawrence’s art teacher and mentor, Charles Alston. Although the young painter was not officially assigned to Alston’s team, significant connections to the murals can be found in his artwork, in the murals themselves and in their shared participation in a discourse on race, medicine and health in urban America. In exploring these connections, this talk shows how Black life could and could not be represented on the walls of Harlem Hospital, and how a commitment to care within and for Black communities took shape in Lawrence’s art.

Tanya Sheehan is James M. Gillespie Professor and chair of the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Colby College, and director of Academic and Scholarly Engagement at the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018). Her edited books include Photography, History, Difference (2014), Photography and Its Origins (2015, with Andres Zervigon), Grove Art Guide to Photography (2017), Photography and Migration (2018), Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death (2022) and Modernism, Art, Therapy (2024, with Suzanne Hudson). She is currently a senior fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she is completing a book that explores the subjects of medicine and public health in art by African Americans.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the University Library and HHIVE.