When medicine becomes art and art becomes medicine, the patient is the audience — that’s the lesson Dr. Eric Avery’s exhibit, currently on display in Creighton’s Lied Gallery, aims to teach.

In Creighton University’s Lied Art Gallery, students and staff alike can walk around in contemplation, taking in the vibrant colors and precise strokes of prints evocative of expert medical examinations that only someone like Dr. Eric Avery could create in his exhibit Art as Medicine/Medicine as Art.  

Avery said he’s both “an artist who became a doctor” and “a doctor who is making art.” His life’s work, he said, has been putting the disciplines of art and medicine together, and the gallery, which will be held until Oct. 5, shows a part of that work.  

In some pieces, the connection between art and medicine is easy to see. As the exhibitgoers walk in, they see a large print that shows the process of a lymphocyte becoming hijacked by the HIV virus and becoming a vector for producing more of it. It’s a very technical print, but one that demands attention through its imagery.  

In other prints, the art isn’t so obviously connected to medicine. “Uvalde Massacre 5/24/22 11:30 am” is a vivid depiction of the events that happened at Robb Elementary that day. The messy cherry reds and dirtied greens of the children killed clash with the dark greys and blacks of the guns from the other side of the print in a way that directly references “The Bloody Massacre in King-Street,” by Paul Revere. 

Avery’s journey along the winding roads of medicine and art began during his time in university.  

“I was getting a degree in art at the University of Arizona during the Vietnam war, and I was going to be drafted,” he said. “It was my art professor at the University of Arizona who said, ‘Eric, you could avoid the draft if you continued your education.’”  

Avery had always wanted to become a doctor and an artist, but he protested this to his professor as an impossibility. It was then that his professor said something that would change the entire trajectory of his life.  

“He said, ‘Eric, you’re always going to make prints. And when you get really old, you’ll look back at your life, and your life will have behind it a trail of prints that look like dandruff that fell out of your life. Go have an interesting life,’” Avery recalled. 

It was as if the impossibilities had flipped for Avery that day. It wasn’t that he couldn’t be both a doctor and an artist, it was that it was impossible for him to be anything other than a doctor and an artist.  

When a doctor is an artist and the art becomes medicine, the audience becomes the patient, Avery explained.  

Sometimes it’s personal. “The Las Dhure Certificate” is a print that Avery made at a refugee camp in Somalia and gave to someone he was working with there. She kept it for 40 years.  

“She said, ‘I just wanted to find you and thank you for making that [and] giving me that print.’ That is art that was helpful to heal a person who had been broken in that place and has reminded her over the years of what she had gone through and how she became or however she formed her life,” Avery said. 

But the artist isn’t always the doctor prescribing the medicine. Sometimes, Avery is the patient to his own art.  

“I’d say the art I make is really to help me keep myself together. And when I took care of AIDS patients, it was really important for me to make art to process. And my own therapist helped me understand that the cutting of my blocks, the printing of my blocks, helped me to process what I was doing,” he said. 

By creating art to process his own experiences, each of Avery’s pieces has a myriad of meanings woven into them. “Zoonosis,” a print covering the spillover of diseases between human and nonhuman animals, shows a hellish, almost biblical scene of diseases mixing between humans and animals in an eye-catching caldron.  Twin cornucopias at the top of the print share not blessings, but sicknesses instead.  

To dissect these intricate puzzles of prints, Rachel Mindrup, B.F.A., M.F.A., M.D., the endowed chair in medical humanities and an associate professor at Creighton, invited Avery to speak to her class “Art of Examination” on Monday, Sept. 22. Medical student Scott Shlanta explained how Avery presented his prints to them in a fusion of literary analysis and medical examination.  

“He had us split into small groups and pick a painting to present to him like we were doing rounds at a hospital … Mine was about the life cycle of the HIV virus and the different parts of that cycle that we can target using drugs and disrupt. He presented it to us in a way that I think we felt familiar with, which was a cool way to teach it,” Shlanta said.  

For Shlanta, the experience with Avery’s exhibits left him with a new perspective on how art could be used in medicine.  

“You know, I will say that I was shocked by the amount that I learned about medicine and the history of medicine through his art. Not only did he give us a historical account of what happened with those different epidemics, but he was also able to show us through his art a bit of what the emotion of living through those times were like,” Shlanta said. 

That visual power of Avery’s work is exactly what he wants to impart on the students of Creighton.  

“I tell undergraduate students to think about healthcare as an area where they can go in and get jobs, because healthcare is going to need visual,” Avery said. “Tell art students they ought to think about healthcare because it’s going to be so visual. In the future, we’re going to need visual thinkers to come into healthcare.” 

To Avery, every person who sees the art exhibit is left healed in some way. Whether they gained a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of the HIV virus or a new perspective on what really happened during the Boston Massacre, they walk away changed — not through a pill or a prescription, but through a print.