Art Breaks Out of the Frame

Premed students discuss a nineteenth-century painting

A group of future physicians clusters in the museum’s Carson Teaching Gallery for their postbaccalaureate introductory biology class. “To be great at medicine, your powers of observation need to be stellar, because patients don’t tell you everything you need to know,” says guest speaker Dr. Jill Griffin. So the students—who previously have practiced precise description using seventeenth-century Dutch paintings—say what they see in a series of clinical photographs.

One is obviously a common blister, but Griffin pulls the students back from rushing to a diagnosis. “OK,” she says, summarizing their observations. “We see a thumb with a red ring around the outside, topped by a fluid-filled sack of skin.” Students add details until they deduce, Sherlock Holmes-style, that this patient’s hand was burned by splashes of hot liquid.

“Art forces us to look at the world differently,” says Emilie Heidel ’10. “I think the point was to teach us how to stop making judgments and to let the data tell us what it has to say—a useful skill for both artists and scientists.”

Dean of prehealth programs David Gardner explains that this method, developed by the Yale Center for British Art and Yale School of Medicine, helps premed students “because those who are trained to be more precise in their observations will be better at making diagnoses in a clinical setting.” Stomberg describes the advantage using more artistic language. “To a doctor, the difference between having an ear infection or not is the difference between having your ear be Veronese red versus Titian red.”

Assistant Curator Rachel Beaupre (left) helps Professor Wes Yu and his students examine a collage by Joseph Cornell.

English professor Wes Yu’s tutorial in Surrealist Poetry begins not with words, but with a silent film by artist Joseph Cornell. Images of the moon, volcanoes, and other natural phenomena are intercut with deliberately unrelated shots of upper-class women. “This fragmentation of style offers what?” asks Yu, whose students soon move on to examine eight of Cornell’s collages.

Guided by Yu, Assistant Curator Rachel Beaupre, and Ellen Alvord, students inspect the collages, turning each over gingerly to read words pasted on the reverse of some. The artwork they focus on reveals itself, ten minutes in, as a complex collection of images with layers of meaning that they tease out. At the end of an hour, fragmentation of experience—a key concept in surrealism—is clear. (“It’s about how you interpret what the artist represents,” concludes Najwa Aswad ’16.) Only now is it time for the students to consider poetry.

Yu says, “In an art museum, I can ask a student questions that train her eyes to observe, comment, and inquire based only on what’s there. A museum visit can help transfer the experience of observation from visual works of art to written ones.”

Neurobiology students learn about how the brain perceives color by recreating a black and white photo using colors of similar value.

Students in Professor Susan Barry’s Neurobiology of Art and Music course comprehended color perception in a novel way—by recreating a black-and-white photograph by Ansel Adams using torn pieces of colored paper. Brian Kiernan, the museum’s technician and an artist himself, invented the exercise to teach the concept of luminance. The challenge was to select colors with the same luminance as each shade of grey, then to arrange the colored scraps to create the same shading and depth effects as the original image. Sure, Barry could just have lectured about luminance, but, she says, “there’s nothing like doing work yourself to really understand a concept.”

Completing an art exercise was initially intimidating for some of her science students, Barry admits, but she says they enjoyed it. “I take them out of the lab—an environment they’re used to—and put them in the museum, where what they see is for the most part new to them,” she says. “There’s plenty of neurological evidence that we learn best when presented with novelty.”

At the Skinner Museum, history students encounter how early American women lived.

“I taught here for years without realizing what a resource the museum is or how I could use it,” admits Mary Renda, associate professor of history. In her Gender and Power in the History of Mount Holyoke course, Renda brought her students to the College’s Skinner Museum to get a visceral sense of women’s lives during the Mount Holyoke Seminary era. Getting a hands-on sense by handling objects—a rack for drying flax, a butter churn, a cooking pot, an open hearth—“is so different from just reading documents,” she says. For instance, students realized how strong early American women had to be by lifting a forty-pound cast-iron pot used to dye cloth. “As a historian, I want them to look with new eyes at documents, and that is enhanced by the visual work we do in the museum,” Renda says.