Meet Tanya Sheehan, ‘01 HIAA MA, ’05 HIAA PhD

Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jette Professor of Art and the Chair of Science, Technology and Society at Colby College

“I chose Brown because…

I wanted to integrate different forms of knowledge. The graduate program allowed me to take courses not only in art history but also in literature, history, and modern culture and media. At Brown I learned how to create communities of thinkers when such groups did not already exist. For example, I founded Brown’s first Mellon Graduate Workshop to bring together graduate students across departments interested in learning about the critical methods of the field of science, technology, and society (STS). I also brought an international graduate conference to Brown on the history of medicine, science, and technology. The college encouraged interdisciplinary innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit among its students. These skills have shaped my career as a scholar and teacher.  

I co-founded…

Colby College’s first Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab (PHIL) in 2021 to focus on critical perspectives on the intersection of medicine and race. The PHIL is a faculty-led research lab for which I served as Principal Investigator between 2021 and 2024. You can read a lot more about the work we did during that time on our website (web.colby.edu/medrace) and in this Colby News story. 

At Colby…

I only teach undergrads, and I am always reminding them of how art historians are trained to be critical thinkers who work across numerous fields. For me those fields include visual studies, American social history, medical and health humanities, popular culture studies, and critical race studies. An art historian has to know something about how images are made, the people and institutions who make them, and the myriad contexts - social, cultural, historical, political - in which they derive meanings. So a career in art history requires not only visual literacy skills but deep curiosity and nimbleness, qualities that are essential to navigating our fast-faced, image-filled world. 

The book I am currently writing…

is titled After Harlem Hospital: Modernism, Medicine, and African American Art. The book explores American modernism’s engagement with medicine and public health by focusing on the circle of Harlem-based artist Charles Alston. It begins with the federally funded, monumental mural cycle that Alston supervised at Harlem Hospital between 1936 and 1940, and traces the understudied artistic reflections on medicine to which it gave rise in subsequent decades. These include the medical illustrations Alston published in collaboration with surgeon Louis T. Wright as well as the creative engagement with ideas about art therapy in paintings by Alston’s former student Jacob Lawrence and the women artists on Alston’s mural team: Selma Day, Elba Lightfoot, Sara Murrell, and Georgette Seabrooke Powell. Harlem Hospital showed how their artworks from the 1930s to 1950s challenged associations of modernism and medicine with traditional notions of whiteness and masculinity, while forging positive visions of care by and for Black communities. 

In June 2024, I published an article in The Art Bulletin based on one chapter of the book, which looks at the eleven artworks that Jacob Lawrence created in relation to his hospitalization for mental illness in 1949-50, now known as his Hospital series. That research is now informing an exhibition and catalogue I’m co-organizing with Dr. Lauren Applebaum at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Titled Art of Integration: Jacob Lawrence’s Hospital Series, that show will bring together paintings from the series for the first time since they were first exhibited at New York’s Downtown Gallery in 1950. It also puts them into conversation with artworks by Lawrence’s contemporaries and by artists working today that speak to the subjects of art, therapy, and race relations. 

I teach…

art history; chair the Department of Science, Technology, and Society; chair the Humanities Division; and direct the academic and scholarly programs at the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art. I am constantly learning new things, building new programs, and engaging with colleagues and students across the entire college. Just this week, for example, I was developing a publication series for the Lunder Institute on the state of American art, leading discussions about what it means to study engineering in a liberal arts context, and working with colleagues in the sciences to define a pre-health course of study through the STS major. 

As with Brown, Colby has been tremendously supportive of my research and scholarship, the interdisciplinary character of which continuously challenges and excites me. 

LINK to Modernism, Art, Therapy

LINK to Study in Black and White