Health Humanities Lab-Global health humument

The artwork on this wall is by students in Professor Kearsley Stewart’s Global Health seminar 302, Global Narratives of HIV/AIDS. These pieces follow art book techniques based on Tom Phillips’s book, A Humument. 

“Humumentism” takes an original text and transforms it using various art styles to create a new interpretation of the text. Sometimes this is considered “excavating” the unexpected from an original text. The style is also considered a form of concrete poetry, and students have worked with poet Kelley Swain in workshops leading up to this exhibition.

Here, students have worked with photocopies of texts they have selected from the new Maria de Bruyn archive of HIV/AIDS literature, housed in Duke University’s Rubenstein Library. 

This collaboration of AIDS, art, and archives is for the launch of the Franklin Humanities Institute Health Humanities Lab. 

Artwork by:

This exhibition was sponsored in part by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.