The Artist Will See You Now is a public experiment in exhaustion, connection, and trading places. Setting up outside major medical centers, Mary Lacy reenacts the schedule of a physician working in a high-volume clinic. But instead of seeing patients, she drew portraits. All day, every day—fifteen minutes each—weeks at a time. So far, the majority of her 500+ participants have been boots on the ground healthcare professionals, as well as their patients. The project draws parallels between the artist/sitter relationship to that of clinician/patient, asking questions about the nature of care and positioning the humanities as an integral part of the public health workforce. The work makes an important connection between time and trust in the clinical setting.
Photo credit: Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
“I was able to see my community, and the people we serve, understand one another in a way I’d never seen before.””
In this art performance, there is interplay between who is in need of care, what that care looks like, and who is in a position to offer help. Often overlooked, how can the arts, and the growing field of Narrative Medicine, provide? Can it expand our sense of expertise and who is in a position to contribute? How do the humanities inform our clinical relationships and, thus, patient outcomes? (Can us as artists feel the weight of that?) Together, can we fight for better healthcare while rebuilding trust at the same time? Could they ever exist apart?
This project aims to reexamine the doctor-patient relationship, expand the national conversation about the issues of time and trust in our medical care, and build interdisciplinary partnerships in order to solve them. What does respect, power, care, and leadership look like in these two parallel professions? With the implementation of AI in medicine, what is the future of the clinical experience and the doctor-patient relationship? How does AI affect the role of the clinician? The role of the artist? What do they have in common and what skills will be most important? What are we gaining and what are we risking? What happens with trust? What do we want? How do we get more people inside that conversation?
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