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.

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

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

Environments

Practice

Database

Experimental Publications

Health Literacy and Teaching Tools

Artist Residencies

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


Using three interconnected frameworks, Materials, Memory and Methods, to structure our work, Art Hx brings together researchers, artists, and the public to critically engage with medical histories, highlighting overlooked stories and imagining new futures.

Practice led initiatives

Artist Talks

Artist Residency

+

+

+

Gatherings

Historical Approaches

Legacies

+

+

+

Reading lists

Teaching Methods

Toolkits

Controlled Vocabulary

Constellations

+

+

+

+

+

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Jess (she/her) is an art historian interested in visual and material histories of consent in Medieval and Early Modern Europe based at the University of Edinburgh. Her work addresses violence, gender, sexuality, and disability. Jess also organizes educational programming and activist interventions through Public Library Quilts, an on ongoing project centering socially engaged histories of quilting, and more of her work can be found via @publiclibraryquilts on social media.

  • Sharbreon is an artist, independent researcher and public scholar whose work centers Black art history, folkways and craft traditions. Her praxis is rooted in Black feminist epistemologies and southern embodied knowledge.

Frequently Asked Questions