About Art Hx

Art Hx is a research and engagement platform for exploring how art can shape understandings of health, history, and collective experience.

We are committed to collaborative and creative methods that steward new forms of knowledge as they emerge through the interaction of people, ideas, and artifacts.

Our Team
Our Themes
FAQ

Art Hx was first conceptualised by Professor Anna Arabindan Kesson, Princeton University and Dr. Jessica Womack in 2020. It has extended into an international collaborative partnership with Dr. Kate Keohane, Dr Jess Bailey, Gabriella Nelson, Dr Sharbreon Plummer and Dr Amanda Herbert.

Our offerings include

Experimental Publications

Artist Residencies

Interpretive Fellowship

Toolkits

Events & Programming

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Current planned activities include the development of a dynamic online platform and database; experimental publications; the creation of health literacy and teaching tools; artist residencies; and a series of outreach workshops focussing on objects, environments, and practice.

Workshops

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Environments

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Practice

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Database

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Experimental Publications

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Health Literacy and Teaching Tools

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Artist Residencies

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Workshops ✶ Environments ✶ Practice ✶ Database ✶ Experimental Publications ✶ Health Literacy and Teaching Tools ✶ Artist Residencies ✶

Materials
Memory
Methods
ArtHx

The three interconnected ways of conceiving care and object

Materials

Materials are never neutral.

From indigo to iron, mahogany to cotton, quinine to plastic, the raw substances of art and medicine carry the weight of histories — of extraction, cultivation, resistance, and repair. This section centers the life of materials across time and space, and the creative interventions we can use to trace how the things we touch, shape, and preserve reveal deeper stories about colonialism, labor, and the body.

Memory

Memory is not only held in archives and monuments — it lives in gestures, textures, and speech.

Here we explore how artists and communities remember through image-making, storytelling, and embodied practice. Whether confronting silences or reactivating ancestral knowledge, these entries reflect on memory and difference as both a burden and a method of survival.

Methods

How do we study art and medical histories otherwise?

This section foregrounds tools, approaches, and collaborative practices that challenge dominant narratives. From academic reading lists to speculative fiction, from curatorial care to community engagement, it invites reflection on how knowledge is produced — and who it serves.

Our Team

  • Dr Jessica Womack is an independent scholar based in Durham, North Carolina. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art of the Caribbean and Black Diaspora.

  • Gabriella Nelson is a mother, city planner and curator whose work lives at the intersection of urban policy, public health, and design. Her current work, rooted in Black womanhood and motherhood, focuses on health equity and racial justice with a deep commitment to Black reproductive histories and the possibilities they hold.

Advisory Board →

Alumni →

  • Anna is a former registered nurse, a mother, writer, and curator. She holds the position of Associate Professor of African American and Black Diaspora Art at Princeton University.

  • Dr. Kate Keohane is Career Development Fellow in History of Art and Wellbeing at St Edmund Hall and the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

  • Dr Amanda Herbert is Associate Professor of Early Modern Americas in the History Department at Durham University. Her research focuses on histories of the body: gender and sexuality; health and wellness; food, drink, and appetite. She wrote Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (Yale, 2014) is an editor for The Recipes Project, an e-journal devoted to the study of historical recipes of all kinds and does food consultancy for chefs, farmers, gardeners, and food advocacy groups.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • What is Art Hx?

    Art Hx was formed in 2020 to address how medicine, art, and race informed each other in the British Empire. We wanted to create a space where these histories and their contemporary legacies could be discussed together. We have evolved into a collaborative research and engagement platform that centers artistic practice to explore the convergences of health, colonial legacies and practices of radical care

  • What does Art Hx mean?

    Hx is a clinical abbreviation used in health professions to represent “history.” So our title – Art Hx, literally Art History – illustrates the close connections between art, colonial histories, and medicine.

  • What does art have to do with it?

    Art and its interpretation shapes understandings of health, history, and collective experience. Art activates, and acts upon, its environments; it opens up the past. Art reveals important transhistorical and transregional connections, and it can catalyze social change.

  • And the glitchy font used for the logo?

    One of the most common typefaces used to circulate medical knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was Caslon, a typeface that remains popular for its readability. But our logo uses “Pathologized Caslon,” a font Bhavani Srinivas, a member of the Art Hx team in 2020-21, designed with an inbuilt ‘blip’ using a scanner, an important tool for copying and circulating information in our contemporary institutions. By distorting the semibold weight of Adobe Caslon, designed by Carol Twombly, Bhavani created a typeface that reminds us of this dissonant history. 

  • Credit

    Art Hx is, and has been, sponsored by the following Princeton centers, departments, and funds: the Center for Health and Wellbeing, the Department of Art & Archaeology, the Department of African American Studies, the Humanities Council, the Dean for Research Innovation Fund for New Ideas in the Humanities and the Dean of Faculty