Looking After: Conversations on Art and Healing

Art historian and environmental humanities scholar Sria Chatterjee is the founder and project lead of the Visualizing the Virus digital project. Her research focuses on the political ecologies of art and design, with a particular focus on soil, transnational environmental histories, the histories of art and science and the relationships between climate, health, and colonialism. Sria is Head of Research and Learning at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Sria received her MA and PhD from the department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton and her BA from Oxford University.

Artist James Clar was born in Wisconsin to immigrant Filipino parents. He studied Film and Animation at New York University and received his Masters from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. His practice explores the narrative potential of light and technology, and has been exhibited at museums and galleries globally. His work is motivated through personal experience and has been heavily influenced by the cities he has lived in. His studio was based in Dubai for 6 years, New York for 15, and 2 years ago he moved to the Philippines. It’s from here that he developed his last two exhibitions Share Location (2022) in Manila, and recently By Force of Nature (2023) that is currently running at Silverlens New York.

Combining sculpture, painting, performative acts, and installation, Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976) grounds his transdisciplinary practice in activism and healing. Engaging a wide variety of visual cultures, Maravilla’s work is autobiographical, referencing his unaccompanied, undocumented migration to the United States due to the Salvadoran Civil War. His work is in the permanent collections of many international institutions. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Robert Rauschenberg Award in 2024, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2019 among others. Maravilla’s work was included in the 12th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art and the 35th Bienal De São Paulo.

Born in Cebu City, Philippines, Stephanie Misa lives in Vienna, Austria where she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2012 in Performative Arts & Sculpture. She has a masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She currently is a lecturer at the Artistic Strategies department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and her recent works include the 9th Bucharest Biennale and an upcoming group show at the Künstlerhaus Vienna. She will be an RMIT Intersect residency fellow in summer 2022.

Art historian and critic Suzanne Hudson is Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She writes with special emphasis on the history, theory, and conventions of painting and process. She is also a regular contributor to Artforum, and has penned numerous essays for international exhibition catalogs and artist monographs. Recent books include Agnes Martin: Night Sea (Afterall/MIT, 2017) and Contemporary Painting (Thames & Hudson, 2021). She is currently at work on Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, a study of the therapeutic origins of art-making within American modernism.

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art at Colby College, Tanya Sheehan is the Principal Investigator of Colby’s inaugural Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab, Critical Medical Humanities: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Medicine. Across her career, Sheehan has worked at the intersection of American art history, medical humanities, and critical race studies. This work includes two books, Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018). Her current book project examines the subjects of medicine and public health in modernist and contemporary art by African Americans. Since 2015 she has served as executive editor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Journal.