The intersections of art and medicine have taken many forms and take viewers on many different paths towards understanding history, our grounding in the world, and our relationship with self and others. This talk, drawn from Anna Arabindan-Kesson’s own experiences of moving between the two fields, reflects on these intersections and the imaginative possibilities they offer for research, for community building, and for justice.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She practiced as a Registered Nurse before completing her PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University. Anna focuses on African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, medicine, and transatlantic visual culture in the 19th century. Her first book is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021). Other projects include a co-written book with Prof Mia Bagneris on 19th century Black Diaspora artists, and a monograph on the intersection of art and medicine in plantation imagery. She is the 2022 Terra Foundation Rome Prize Fellow, a Senior Research Fellow of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the director of the digital humanities project Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism.