Bonnie Pitman, Distinguished Scholar in Residence, UT Dallas
BONNIE PITMAN’S EXPLORATION OF new intersections between art and science at UT Dallas continues to flourish with her research on Art and Medicine, connections between art history and science with a focus on health, healing, and medical education, and The Power of Observation™, the merger of art with brain science using a framework for deep looking to lead to deeper understandings.
Artists’ Response in a Pandemic: COVID-19 and Influenza 1918
Bonnie’s EODIAH Workshop Talk of the fall featured her new research on art and pandemics. Reflecting on the renewed public interest of historical pandemics in light of COVID-19, her virtual talk explored how artists of the early twentieth century responded to the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920 through traditional media such as documentary photos, billboards, and painted portraits of friends and family, as compared to Contemporary artists’ use of new media and social networks to reach wide audiences. In contrast to the paintings of Edward Munch and Egon Schiele, artists who experienced tremendous loss during the turbulent days of the Spanish Flu, the immediacy and intimacy of new media communicates artists’ more direct, personal feelings of loneliness and the physical emptiness of space, as well as documents COVID-19’s impact on individual victims and communities. Watch the full recording here.
View through Barbara Hepworth, Squares with Two Circles (Monolith), 1963 (cast 1964), Bronze, Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection; Nasher Sculpture Center, photograph Bonnie Pitman 2020
Nasher Sculpture Center Art and Health Series
Co-sponsored with EODIAH and the Nasher Sculpture Center, Bonnie gave a series of lectures on Mindful Observation using artwork of the Nasher Sculpture Center. Living in the moment—also called mindfulness—is a state of active, open, intentional attention on the present. Through sessions on Staying in the Moment and Seeing in New Ways, Nurturing Relationships, and The Power of Playfulness, participants were led on a virtual journey through the Nasher Sculpture Center gardens and galleries to practice being fully present in the moment while looking at art. Watch the recordings here.
Classes on Art and Medicine
At the UT Dallas Honors College, Bonnie has been virtually teaching fast-paced, interactive classes on “The Art of Observation” and “Art and Medicine”, introducing students pursuing pre-Med and other degrees in the Sciences to her groundbreaking new method of close looking at art. While limited to only virtual meetings, the classes are highly successful in improving students’ abilities to analyze and appreciate art, identifying personal bias, exploring the science of seeing and thinking, and practicing collaborative discourse using objects from the Dallas Museum of Art’s collection online. Her class with UT Southwestern medical students is also held virtually, using the power of art to develop vital skills for clinical diagnosis through practices of close visual inspection and reflection of those observations.