Curating Care: UChicago alum organizes Lifeblood, an international exhibition on Munch and medicine
By Rivky Mondal
Photo by Ove Kvavik/Munchmuseet
September 9, 2025
Lining the walls of Oslo’s Munch Museum are an X-ray image of a bullet inside Edvard Munch’s hand, vials once used in syphilis treatment, a nurse’s uniform, and oil paintings. In her groundbreaking exhibition Lifeblood, Allison Morehead, PhD ‘07, reimagines the modernist artist not solely through masterpieces like The Scream, but in relation to medicine, illness, and care. The exhibition casts new light on Munch as a patient, caretaker, and witness to modern medicine’s rise. Widely praised in Norwegian, Japanese, French, British, and American press, Morehead’s curation expands Munch studies to the history of medicine, engaging a universal dilemma: what it means to live in a vulnerable body.
The exhibition seeks to redraw the categories of fine art and medical research, revealing intimate and surprising connections between the domains. Morehead sees those efforts rooted in her doctoral research in UChicago’s Art History Department, where she studied Munch’s symbolist art alongside late-nineteenth-century French psychiatry. Having taken courses in media and languages, presented at interdisciplinary workshops, and worked for the Smart Museum and the Art Institute, Morehead knew her research had the potential to reach a broad audience as an exhibition.
At UChicago, mentors across art history, psychology, and history guided her to treat exhibitions themselves as forms of research. Her dissertation advisor Martha Ward, Associate Professor of Art History, reflected that Morehead is a first-rate scholar who built on these lessons to make her work significant in public-facing arenas. “Her work points towards a future for the humanities,” said Ward. “It intertwines science, art, and history in its provocative questioning.”
It's easy to see Ward’s point when you enter the gallery space. Lifeblood places Munch’s art in provocative proximity to medical and reproductive technology. Visitors can compare Munch’s death mask with his grim style. Different versions of the print Madonna, long recognized for its sinewy eroticism, are shown with contraceptive devices from the same period, reframing the work within anxieties around syphilis, intimacy, and reproduction.
“My interdisciplinary and critical museum studies training from UChicago allowed me to be bold about combining these objects,” Morehead reflected. “It helped me to be deeply critical about constructed categories such as ‘art.’”
Such daring curation also models a feminist methodology that invites viewers to re-encounter heroic narratives of modern artists in the context of illness, care, and bodily experience. Morehead uses curation as scholarship, confronting ethical dilemmas around care through the exhibition’s very design. Morehead believes “curatorial work is care-work; the words derive from the same Latin root.” In Lifeblood, a baby incubator is placed against the wall to avoid turning medical artifacts into spectacle; seats are placed nearby should visitors need them.
Exhibiting medical artifacts alongside highly valued art objects poses challenges. But for Morehead, these tensions are sites ripe for innovation. In Lifeblood, a breathing apparatus once sent to Munch, now conserved by the museum, shifts the art’s context to that of a medical museum. In turn, careful conservation practices recast medical devices as cultural relics. The exhibition embodies one of UChicago’s defining traits: field-defining research that refuses disciplinary boxes. Morehead’s work demonstrates how art history and medical history can productively “pollute” one another, producing insights neither field could reach alone.
Teaching has been central to how Morehead carries this work forward. As a professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, she leads seminars on art and medicine, using the collections of the university’s Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the city’s Museum of Health Care. Students trained under her guidance—including through Lifeblood—are pursuing curatorial and academic careers of their own. Like the museum, Morehead’s classroom becomes a space where students confront the politics and inequities of health, art, and the vulnerabilities we share.
Morehead also carries her research into global conversations about art, medicine, and society. She lectures widely on topics from abortion and infanticide to sexually transmitted illness and first-wave feminism, showing how art and the humanities transmit vital knowledge about health, gender, and care. What began as a dissertation at UChicago has become a body of scholarship spanning books, articles, a major exhibition, and now an international medical humanities conference.
For Morehead, the UChicago lesson is lasting: let your archive determine the paths of its dissemination. “Ask early what life your ideas might have in the world,” she advises younger scholars. “Don’t assume they can only take the form of a traditional academic book.”
As for audiences of Lifeblood, the lesson is equally clear: rigorous scholarship and public engagement are mutually reinforcing ways of producing knowledge that can touch everyone with a vulnerable body.
Lifeblood is running at the Munch Museum until September 21.
Read the exhibition overview and Morehead’s research article on “curatorial medical humanities”: