Keith Haring (American, 1958–1990),Pop Shop (Quad III), 1989. Screen print, 13 3/8 x 16 1/2". Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Gift of Arthur and Sheila Prensky, 2006.
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has extended Ivan Bujan's illuminating and instructive work, (Un)masking Health: Counter Perspectives, now on display in the Teaching Gallery until early July.
A collaborative undertaking between Washington University in St. Louis instructor Ivan Bujan and the museum’s curators, the exhibition is the latest in a series of installations that reaches back to the opening of the Teaching Gallery at the museum nearly two decades ago.
“As a university museum, we are always looking for ways to incorporate artworks from the permanent collection into the curriculum, establishing strong links with departments across campus,” says Meredith Malone, curator at the museum. “This was Ivan’s first time curating an exhibition, so my role was really that of a facilitator, helping him identify artworks in the collection that would support his investigation of the notion of health as a contested arena embedded in exclusionary ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class.”
Like the many questions that animate Bujan’s scholarship — What is health? What is disease? How are these things socially constructed, and how do their meanings change over time? — the inquiry central to his installation is as ambitious in scope as it is rich in nuance, asking his viewers to consider new frameworks of reckoning systemic and structural racism, the ongoing AIDS crisis, and the COVID pandemic.
Bujan, originally from Croatia, moved to New York in 2013 to pursue graduate education in performance studies and queer theory. After receiving his doctorate from Northwestern University, he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University, where he now teaches the course “Queering the History of Health” in conjunction with the exhibition.
“I want to activate the gallery as a learning space outside of the classroom, as a venue to explore how artwork and archival ephemera can be used to speak to larger social, political, and cultural issues,” says Bujan. “Students come to my class with presumptions, but I like to break those down so that we can build together and see what we learn.”
Taken together, the photographs and posters (including one produced by Bob Hansman in collaboration with St. Louis Effort for AIDS in the 1980s), fact sheets and activism stickers, and artifacts of public art and health crises all constitute a spectra of materials that professors in different schools and colleges at the university have used in their instruction this year.
“While Teaching Gallery displays are designed for a specific class, the broader themes are relevant to courses across disciplines,” says Malone. “Ivan Bujan’s installation, (Un)masking Health: Counter Perspectives, for example, is being used in gallery lessons for WashU medical students learning about patient stigma and social determinants of health. Each collaboration brings fresh and interesting perspectives in terms of the questions being asked and the new insights into the given artworks, as well as the thought-provoking juxtaposition of materials.”
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is free and open to the public. The exhibition (Un)masking Health: Counter Perspectives runs through early July 2022.
