On October 18th, at 7:00 p.m., in support of a small exhibition centered around Joel Babb’s painting, Coronary Bypass Operation at Brigham and Women’s, Boston, and related drawings, we are both honored and delighted to present a conversation between the artist and Co-Director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Anne Collins Goodyear, PhD. Don’t miss what is sure to be a fascinating evening!

In 1995-6, I painted a recreation of the first successful transplantation of an organ in a human being for the doctors at Harvard Medical School who achieved the transplant.  Dr. Joseph Murray, who won the Nobel Prize for this accomplishment, took me around the operating rooms of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston where this took place.  

I undertook this commission because I had heart surgery as a boy of 13. Part of the project involved going around the operating rooms with Dr. Murray and photographing surgeries being performed to understand what goes on, get a feel for the light and atmosphere of operating rooms. 

The painting finished and installed at Harvard Medical School, I told the doctors that I would like to do a painting of a modern surgery which I could observe and photograph directly. They arranged for me to observe, and one of the surgeries I photographed was a coronary bypass operation done by Dr. John Collins who had done the first heart transplant that had been done in New England. This painting and two studies are in the show.

Dr. Collins is the father of Anne Collins Goodyear, the co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.  Anne and I will discuss surgery and art. With Anne growing up in a household revolving around surgery, she developed a vocation for art, and can give a little art historical background to surgery and art.  I will talk about the process of doing the transplant painting, the painting of her father performing heart surgery. I later did a painting of a face transplant performed at the Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston.  The study of anatomy joins medicine and art, which are two ancient crafts. Or one could say the practice of medicine and surgery are arts.  We will discuss,

~ Joel Babb