Tanya Sheehan

My book project explores the relations among art, race, and medicine in the circle of New York-based artist Charles Alston. When Alston became the first Black supervisor hired by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, he enlisted the young artists he trained at the Harlem Art Workshop to help create a monumental mural cycle at Harlem Hospital between 1936 and 1940. After Harlem Hospital begins with that foundational project and traces the understudied artistic reflections on medicine to which it gave rise in subsequent decades, from the medical illustrations that Alston published in collaboration with renowned Harlem Hospital surgeon Louis T. Wright, to artist Jacob Lawrence’s engagement with art and therapy in the context of his own treatment at Hillside Hospital in Queens. Their work refuted racial stereotypes that equated Black people with physical and social disease, and challenged associations of medicine with traditional notions of whiteness and masculinity.