Pulse
Briefs
Going Public
On the first 70-degree Friday afternoon of the year, people crowd into a small gift shop near the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis to celebrate an art opening. Many are friends, colleagues, and patients of the three artists—two of whom are physicians who are publicly displaying their work for the first time.
The show, called “Take Two and Call Me in the Morning,” which opened in mid-April and ran through early May, featured the whimsical oil and acrylic paintings of Donna Block, M.D., an ob/gyn, and the nature photography of Al Greenwood, M.D., an anesthesiologist. The idea for it grew out of an encounter that took place last year in Fairview Southdale Hospital’s doctors’ lounge. Greenwood brought in a book of his work to show colleagues. Block, who was just starting to paint at the time, was encouraged by his accomplishments.
A year later, the two physicians along with an artist friend of Block decided to show their work at Corazon, a gift shop owned by one of Block’s patients.
A self-taught artist, Block says she has discovered parallels between painting and surgery. Both require problem-solving skills, good hand-eye coordination, patience, and planning. When preparing for surgery, she says, she mentally walks through the procedure. When painting, she calculates how much paint to use and how to make fine details look as if they were created without effort. “But there’s a different level of risk with painting,”
she says.
Block, who owns Clinic Sofia in Edina, says she and Greenwood hope to encourage others to explore their artistic side. One physician recently told her how she and Greenwood inspired him to join a writing class. “It appears all of us are looking for creative outlets.”—Kim Kiser
A Reason to Sing
If the pleasure of taking a deep breath and opening your mouth in song isn’t enough to get you to choir practice, then consider this: According to a new study by Chorus America, a group promoting choral singing, singers make better, happier citizens. Adults who sing in choirs are more likely to join civic groups, donate money to philanthropic organizations, vote, and support other art forms than their nonsinging peers. And children who sing appear to be more confident and academically successful than those who don’t. Chorus America touts choral singing as “an accessible entry point for arts exposure.” The report is available online at www.chorusamerica.org.
From Past to Present
A small group of current and former faculty and staff gathered recently at the Owen H. Wangensteen Historical Library on the University of Minnesota campus to kick off an initiative to capture the oral history of the Academic Health Center (AHC).
Collecting the stories of people involved with the AHC’s component schools is one piece of the larger Academic Health Center History Project, which was the idea of Frank Cerra, M.D., senior vice president for health sciences. “I’ve been here for 28 years, and I always felt one thing was missing: a sense of who we are and where we came from,” he told the audience. The goal of the project, he says, is to create a repository of stories and documents that can be used for scholarly study.
A collaborative effort of the AHC and the University of Minnesota Libraries, the history project began three years ago when archivist Erik Moore was hired to gather historical documentation about the center, which was founded in 1970.
In December, the university brought on oral historian Dominique Tobbell, Ph.D., to collect the stories of the people behind the paper trail.
Anyone who has a story to share about the AHC can contact Tobbell at dtobbell@umn.edu or 612/626-5114.
Bringing Art to Boynton
Psychiatrist Gary Christenson’s interest in the connection between art and medicine began with a construction project.
Christenson, who is director of the mental health clinic at the University of Minnesota’s Boynton Health Service, was watching the remodeling of the clinic five years ago when he noticed something missing: “We had nice new carpeting and wall coverings, but there were no plans for anything on the walls,” he says.
As an art collector who had just moved from a house to a condominium and no longer had space to display his entire collection, Christenson brought in a silk kimono and some Inuit and Japanese woodblock prints to hang in the hallways. Soon, other staff members started adding their own contributions.
“We started getting comments from our student patients that it was really helpful, that it was very soothing, and that they could use the art as a way to break the ice. That set me off to expand these efforts throughout the building.”
Since then, Christenson has coordinated photo and art contests for staff, overseen the production of an art calendar, encouraged music therapy students to play in the lobbies, and worked with a professor of art to install cloud paintings by her students on the ceiling of Boynton’s dental clinic. He has established two galleries in the building that feature rotating exhibits of student, faculty, staff, and alumni works. More than 50 artists have contributed.
Patients weren’t the only ones noticing the changes. Mary Faith Marshall, Ph.D., and Jon Hallberg, M.D., who lead the university’s Center for the Arts and Medicine and have offices on the fifth floor of the Boynton building, were impressed with the transformation. Earlier this year, they named Christenson artistic director of the 3-year-old center, which seeks to infuse the arts in medical training and encourage their incorporation in clinics and hospitals.
One of his first projects in that role has been to bring the Society for the Arts in Healthcare’s conference to Minneapolis in April 2010. The 1,700-member society is made up of physicians, nurses, administrators, artists, and art, recreational, and dance therapists. Christenson is also forging relationships between the medical school and the art, music, dance, and design departments on campus. “It’s the merging of boundaries,” he says.—Kim Kiser