Transcending Boundaries: A Gallery Walk Through the Intersection of STEM and Art
STEAM is the future – this was epitomized in the art piece that Roski students Jiwon Lee and Chloe Barker created and presented at the Artist and Researcher event at the Hoyt Gallery at the Keck School of Medicine. The piece was inspired by JEP STEM Education Programs Director Dr. Dieuwertje “DJ” Kast and is part of an exhibition of a project within the HEAL Program.
“The HEAL (Humanities, Ethics, Art, and Law) Program at the Keck School of Medicine of USC provides students with the tools they need to develop their professional identities as they accept the complexities of a life committed to health care. Medical students are confronted with an ever-expanding body of scientific knowledge and must embrace their role as lifelong learners—as physician-citizen-scholars—who are open to diverse perspectives, willing to grapple with uncertainty, to seek the expertise of colleagues and their patients, and to find joy in their chosen profession.”
One component of the HEAL program is focused on Art and Medicine. The Art and Medicine program provides students the opportunity to appreciate the human aspects of the diseases and systems they are studying in their medical classes. Students witness an artist-patient’s expression of how illness affects their life: the creation, exhibition, and discussion of art brings students and physicians into conversations that generate profound empathy for those experiencing illness and cultivate creative approaches to care.
HEAL artist-in-residence, Ted Meyer, works with artist-patients to develop exhibits that align with the Keck School’s core medical school curriculum, fostering enhanced understanding between patients and future health care professionals. Specifically, one component of the Art and Medicine initiative is the Artist & Researcher Project. This project is a meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers and artists and has been so for seven years. The last three years has been a partnership between Keck School of Medicine and the Roski School of Fine arts. The final products that the Roski students create are placed in the Hoyt Gallery at the Keith Administration Building on USC Health Science Campus. March 27th was a gallery walk of the 14 artist renditions that were made of topics surrounding HPV, lung cancer, stem cells, and so much more.
Two USC Roski Fine Art Students, Jiwon Lee and Chloe Barker, were paired with Dr. Dieuwertje Kast to create art based on her work in the field of STEM education. These artists choose a comic book style background to appeal to the elementary school audience that Dr. Kast works with. They had always found posters at book fairs so inspiring and so she wanted to create similar posters that represented the students and so that they could envision themselves also going into these STEM careers. The word future in the slogan “Brighter Minds, Brighter Futures” is italicized for emphasis that these kids are the future of STEM, medicine, and so much more.
The artwork really encapsulated Dr. Kast’s work because her work at JEP is about inspiring future scientists which this art series also aims to do. Art and science can really amplify each other in such creative and innovative ways.