From the June 23, 2023 issue of the Transformational Times - Student Leadership issue
Art Inspires Leadership and Human Flourishing
Christine Fleming, MA
On January 21, 2023, the Student Leadership Group of the Kern National Network and the Kern Institute organized the "Day of Character and Caring in Leadership," MCW partnered with the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University to offer medical students the opportunity to step outside their usual learning space and consider human flourishing and the qualities of team leadership while exploring two art exhibitions. Christine Fleming, the former assistant director of learning and engagement for the museum, describes how art, leadership, and medicine came together ...
As an academic art museum, the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University is uniquely positioned to embrace experimentation, collaboration, new ways of knowing, student agency, and rigorous intellectual discourse.
The Museum’s mission is to connect people — on campus, in the community, and around the world — to art, to ideas, and to one another. Through inclusive programming, the Museum uses the interdisciplinary lens of art to cultivate knowledge, insight, understanding, and belonging.
As our institutional vision inspires us to do, our collaboration with MCW's Character and Caring in Leadership Retreat -- an activity of the Kern Institute and Kern National Network partnership -- sought to spark transformational experiences with art that amplify personal, intellectual, social, and physical well-being.
Inspiring conversations that encourage compassion
During the Retreat, MCW participants explored two exhibitions: Basic Needs and Justice: The Pursuit of Human Flourishing, and Tomás Saraceno: Entangled Air. Themes from these exhibitions served as inspiration for an empathy-building activity that centered on celebrating community, critical looking, and connection making. Our activities included looking, listening, talking, moving, reasoning, and discussing.
Basic Needs and Justice: The Pursuit of Human Flourishing explores the interrelationship between basic needs and justice. If something is so essential to human life that no human being can survive without it, then access to this basic need would seem to be a matter of justice. Yet the identification of these specific needs is not always straightforward. Determining how much of any given need one person requires is often complicated.
Communities have formed and fractured over their answers to these questions, which demand both an understanding of the nature of the human person and a notion of what it means to live a fully human life. The works of art in this exhibition highlight this struggle. They showcase how different disciplinary approaches can help us recognize what humans truly need to thrive. And they inspire dialogue about how to create the conditions for everyone to have their basic needs met.
Marquette faculty members from across campus who have expertise in (and often teach classes about) the Basic Needs and Justice theme in the Marquette Core Curriculum curated pairs of images that address, explore, and challenge both our notion of what it takes to flourish as human beings and our understanding of what we are obliged to do to help one another meet those needs.
Tomás Saraceno: Entangled Air features work from Argentina-born, Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno, who for the past two decades has activated projects aimed toward rethinking the co-creation of the atmosphere with the goal of eliminating carbon emissions.
The works in this exhibition speak to Saraceno’s ongoing desire to communicate the extent to which humans, animals and plants relate to the air. Within this co-dependent ecosystem, humans unequally share the air and disproportionately harm the atmosphere: combustion-generated pollutants from burning coal, oil, and natural gas have far-reaching impacts on public health and climate change.
This exhibition was organized with Dr. Somesh Roy, and curated by Emilia Layden, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, and organized in partnership with Lynne Shumow, Curator for Academic Engagement. Dr. Roy is an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering at Marquette University, his research attempts to unravel the mysteries of black carbon, commonly known as soot. He operates within the field of combustion and aerosol science, studying the formation of soot at an atomic level in combustion systems, its dispersion at the atmospheric level, and the perception and mitigation of its impacts on a personal and social level. Visit the exhibition’s interpretive space to learn more about Dr. Roy’s research and the participatory programming developed with it.
We believe that art is universal
From the Museum’s perspective, the collaboration with MCW was similar to other collaborations our team regularly facilitates. We believe that art is universal, and as such can be used to investigate all topics and human experiences.
We believe the Museum space is transformational, and we could see first-hand the change in the Retreat participants after their tour. It was an absolute pleasure to partner with MCW for this retreat. Seeing participants connect in new ways, both to the artworks on view, and each other, is why we do this work.
As our UWM ArtsECO intern, Olivia Brown, said, “I was pleasantly surprised to find a balance of curiosity and a willingness to listen. I genuinely loved being able to interact and exchange ideas with the attendees, and to watch them discuss and exchange thoughts with each other. I felt a great sense of community from this group that even enhanced the museum experience for me as an intern and tour guide.”
For more information on the retreat, here is a link to a KNN blog post (What/Why/How):
Christine Fleming, MA, coordinated Marquette University's role in hosting the student retreat at the Haggerty Museum of Art. Fleming, the former Assistant Director of Learning and Engagement at the Haggerty, now serves at the Manager of Docent and Tour Programs at the Milwaukee Art Museum.