Healing Remedies for Harmful Times

So many of today’s hot-button medical issues—debates over contraception, reproductive choice, and access to healthcare—center on pharmaceutical treatments. Life in a post-COVID world revolves around access to specific drugs. As medical care and government oversight become thoroughly enmeshed in divisive political partisanship, we need new ways to think and talk about healing—not only of our bodies, but also of the social afflictions tied to healthcare inequities.

This exhibition, co-curated by Dr. John Corso-Esquivel and Lia Rose Newman, follows artists interested in healing. They work with images of prescription drugs, alternative and complementary medicines, ritualistic healing, and the ethics of care. Though their media and approaches vary, they share a sensibility rooted in the idea that medicine can both heal and harm, serve as both poison and cure.

The exhibition explores works that bring an ethics of care to relationships in need of healing and treatment. It considers the complex ways medicine circulates—through bodies, communities, and public debate—shaping how society responds to illness and vulnerability.

While medicine serves as a vehicle—both symbolically and literally—for administering treatment, the artists in this exhibition recognize the value of slow-built circuits of care: relationships between practitioners and clients, patients and caregivers, artists and viewers. They aim to forge meaningful opportunities for reflection and relationship-building as essential elements of a new ethics of care in the 21st century.