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 gallery 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 art gallery 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 reflection 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”, which appears in Health Humanities in Postgraduate Medical Education (Oxford U Press, 2018) expands on how looking at and making art can vitalize learning in medicine. She is a Harvard Fellow specializing in Art Museum-Based Health Professions Education.

Time and place

3 sessions in sequence:

3:00 to 4:45 on Wednesdays November 2, 9, 16, 2022

In person: Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St West

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.

ATTENDANCE IS EXPECTED AT ALL THREE seminar/workshops.
No art experience is necessary.

Tickets are graciously provided by the AGO.

For more information and to register, please contact: emstern@artandmind.net

Join the Canadian Association for Health Humanities and the League of Canadian Poets on Wednesday, September 29, at 6:00pm EST for the September edition of Cross-Pollinations, with Hsien Seow of McMaster University and poet Shazia Hafiz Ramji.

The Canadian Association for Health Humanities and the League of Canadian Poets are partnering to deliver a series of monthly rounds focused on health, arts and humanities. These live sessions will feature both artists and professionals in the Health Humanities field for a multi-faceted conversation about topics related to healthcare, art, healing, and humanities.

In this ground-breaking new series, health humanities and poetry come together under the same scope, combining artistic expression with health practice and research. The conversations of Cross-Pollinations will illuminate new and emerging insights and perspectives on healthcare opportunities and challenges, healthcare approaches and advances, as well as build bridges of connection between health professionals, humanities and the arts.

This series is ideal for people in arts communities, poets and writers, as well as those working in healthcare.

This one-credit-per-hour Group Learning program has been certified by the College of Family Physicians of Canada for up to 12  Mainpro+® credits.

Our August event with a presentation from Zamina Mithani, Nancy Duan, and Karen Wang of the University of British Columbia, with a reading from poet Conyer Clayton, was absolutely delightful. If you couldn’t make it, or want to revisit the event, you can now watch the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTMxznw60W8&list=PLA4LWs4tY9GBY4FchwaJwwDdnsJq-aa8H&index=5

Our September event next week also promises to be very exciting. Join us for a presentation from Hsien Seow of McMaster University, discussing the health care podcast The Waiting Room Revolution.. Hsien Seow, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Oncology, McMaster University and the Canada Research Chair in Palliative Care and Health System Innovation. His interests are to improve the experience of facing serious illness for patients and families. Funded research focuses on provider education, home care interventions, and patient-family experience. He earned a PhD from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and a BSc from Yale University. His research website is www.palliativecareinnovation.com. He is the co-host of the popular health care podcast The Waiting Room Revolution, a public facing education about a re-imagining of palliative care, with a new season launching in September 2021.

Hsien will be joined by poet Shazia Hafiz Ramji, who will read following his presentation. Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Maisonneuve, and is forthcoming in Event and Canthius. Shazia was named as a “writer to watch” by the CBC, and her poetry and prose have been nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes. She is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is a co-editor for Watch Your Head, an anthology on the climate crisis and is at work on a novel.

We look forward to seeing you next week on Wednesday, September 29, at 6:00pm EST!

Cheers,

Nic Brewer
League of Canadian Poets