Convalescence essay featured in Radical Pedagogies collection on teaching as an artistic method

I’m thrilled to be a contributor to the collection Radical Pedagogies published by the U.S. Latinx Art Forum. From the collection webpage: Edited by Andrea Lepage and Elizabeth Ferrer, this collection explores how Latinx artists use pedagogical strategies as integral elements of their artistic practice, treating education not just as context but as a radical, creative medium. Central to this approach is an artistic reckoning with archives, which might be understood both as sites of historical power and as spaces for recovery and reimagination. Radical Pedagogies invites consideration of how artists reimagine teaching (broadly defined) as a form of resistance and social transformation.

My essay, Pepón Osorio’s Convalescence: Reimagining the Teaching Hospital, considers how Osorio’s 2024 installation reimagines the teaching hospital by showcasing the stories of five Philadelphians with life-threatening conditions navigating the U.S. healthcare system. I discuss how Osorio reconfigures the hospital as a site of critical learning, centering the patients’ lived experience and community-based forms of care in tension with institutional medical authority. In the essay, I incorporate my first-hand experience of medical student reflections on engaging with the installation and its impact on their understanding of being a good doctor. Emphasizing the installation’s educational capacity, I demonstrate how such projects can contribute to medical training through critical engagement with art.

Pepón Osorio, Convalescence, (2024). Installation view. Thomas Jefferson University, Center City Campus, Philadelphia, September 3–November 1, 2024. Photograph by Constance Mensh. Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia.