Critical reflections: life through art’s lens
How Allison Morehead is bringing art into public conversation
Allison Morehead (King’s 1997) has always been fascinated by art but also critical of art spaces. Her passion is centred on modern art and collaborating with those in the arts sector and beyond. As a professor in Art History, Allison has recently shifted her focus to curating an exhibition, a departure from, but also a high point of, her career in academia.
Allison’s work stems from her time at Cambridge. Her recent exhibition, “Lifeblood: Edvard Munch” at the MUNCH Museum in Norway, focuses on modern art and modern medicine. It epitomises her desire to ground art in its context so the public can reflect on how healthcare shapes their lives.
Allison Morehead
Allison Morehead
Early introductions to art: a desire to delve into collections and archives
Allison’s initial encounters with art in her Canadian childhood were informed by her parents’ careers in the arts and arts education.
Her mother, a high school art teacher, led tours in Europe for students, and sometimes Allison and her father got to tag along.
But despite this youthful connection with art, she often felt distant from the artists she studied. “I really wanted to get into museums and archives and be close to the art that I was starting to learn about.”
The openness of King’s College to a diversity of students and its celebration of the arts appealed to Allison. “And, of course, there was Jean Michel Massing, who is a legend in the art history world.”
Experiencing Cambridge: tradition and contemporary life
Allison’s time at Cambridge as a post-graduate student, supervised by John Gage in the 1990s, was defined by her keenness to experience all aspects of the University and its connection to art.
One of Cambridge’s most renowned art galleries, Kettle’s Yard, provided an escape from the hustle and bustle of student life.
“Jim and Helen Ede’s house showed me how people lived with modern art and arranged their own spaces artfully. I found that moving and inspiring.”
Allison’s interest in the arts extended to the prominent musical scene at Cambridge.
“Music was so much a part of my everyday life. I played viola in the Cambridge University Music Society orchestra and in chamber ensembles. We performed in King’s Chapel and, incredibly, in Red Square as part of a youth festival in Moscow.”
It was not just traditional music that inspired Allison, as she is a huge fan of trip-hop, which combines electronic music with hip-hop. She could not believe the DJs and bands she could hear at the King’s Affair and other College events.
“It was mind-blowing that you could be in a historical place that was also pulsing with contemporary culture.”
Allison still prizes the independent yet collaborative thinking she took from her time at Cambridge.
“Independent ideas were really valued. You could go off and explore a niche topic in the library, but you would always find somebody interested in talking about whatever it was you were researching.”
Accessing the academic world: the return to Cambridge
Inspired by this approach to academic work at Cambridge, Allison saw education as the best way to explore her passion for art.
In fact, after she finished her PhD at the University of Chicago, Allison returned to King’s in 2006 for a Junior Research Fellowship in Art History. During her days as a student, she had romanticised Cambridge’s traditions, but she recognises, on returning for her fellowship, that academic life was not always easy and accessible to everyone.
“I found it hard as a woman; It was obvious that there were far fewer women fellows. And I found that as a new mum, I couldn’t do many of the social things that were expected of me, that would have enriched my experience and furthered my career.”
However, coming back to Cambridge gave her the opportunity to navigate her academic prospects.
“I taught more than I expected to, undergraduates and post-graduates, and I loved it, so it confirmed for me that I wanted to remain in academia as opposed to taking a museum job.”
Since her time as a research fellow in Cambridge, Allison has been a professor at Queen’s University in Canada, where she teaches Art History, focusing on modern art, critical theory and the medical humanities.
The curatorial process: evaluation and collaboration
Allison’s recent project at the MUNCH Museum in Oslo may seem like a shift from academia, but she feels that an exhibition can serve to connect the academic world to people’s everyday lives.
The exhibition focuses on the work of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, and, among other things, emphasises his depictions of the difference between how men and women experience healthcare.
Just as during her time at Kettle’s Yard, she wants people to experience the exhibition with their whole bodies, rather than just read and reflect on the research.
“The public are not just your readers and your viewers, but your collaborators in creating a critical, embodied feeling about what I call the medicalisation of modern life.”
Photo: Signe Endresen
Photo: Signe Endresen
Allison believes that Munch’s art provides a universal starting point.
“We are all going to get sick, be disabled and eventually die. Those are universal conditions. They are much more universal than health.”
But the way we experience healthcare and medical institutions, she emphasises, is often determined by our particularities: our gender, race, nationality, and class, for instance.
These fundamental truths are opportunities to engage everyone in the exhibition. Another way of doing this is by making the work accessible, specifically through the introduction of non-art objects in the exhibition space.
“I wanted to find a way that people could access art differently. Bringing in these other objects says, ‘We're not telling you necessarily what's more precious or meaningful to you than anything else.’”
This gives the exhibition its own agency. “It's a feminist curatorial project: including these other objects acts to pollute the heroic, masculinising space of the modern art museum. We felt that making the works more accessible in this way could in and of itself be a feminist act.”
Ultimately, then, the exhibition provides a space for visitors to understand art as fully engaged and interwoven with modern life.
“I have a strong belief in the possibilities of art to help us have critical conversations across different identities and disciplinary backgrounds.”
The exhibition in Allison's words
Photo: Ove Kvavik / Munchmuseet
Photo: Ove Kvavik / Munchmuseet
"This is from the opening section of the exhibition. The painting, On the Operating Table, 1902–03, allegorises a medical experience that Munch had in 1902, specifically surgery to deal with a bullet lodged in his left hand. The surgery took place at Norway's national hospital, where Munch was X-rayed (the X-ray is in the exhibition, reminding viewers that this was very new technology in 1902), hence the clinical scene with a gallery of spectators.
The case on the left includes a deaconess uniform, photographs, and a nursing handbook, reminding visitors of the history of women entering nursing as a professionalising realm, and the gendered hierarchies of medicine. At the same time, the painting suggests that medical experiences themselves might destabilise gender."
Photo: Ove Kvavik / Munchmuseet
Photo: Ove Kvavik / Munchmuseet
"This is what I think of as Munch's reproduction themed works, Madonna (which includes representations of spermatoza and a worried-looking fetus), Death and the Maiden, a woman dancing with a skeleton, surrounded by sperm and fetuses, and the very large and very clinical Sketch of a Vulva.
The case in front includes contraceptive technologies, and material related to the birth control movement. In this section, we do not shy away from the the fact that the birth control movement was also implicated in eugenics movements. The introduction of latex condoms in the nineteenth century made condoms more available to middle and working class people."
This is a view of Munch's painting, "Melancholy" (1900-01), through the grille of a window at Gaustad Psychiatric Hospital in Oslo. Munch's painting was based, he claimed, on his experience of encountering a woman in a mental hospital.
The window can bring back suppressed memories for visitors. “A visitor told me that when he was a kid, he had scarlet fever and had to stay in the hospital. His parents could only visit him through a window. He had completely forgotten about it until that moment.”
Allison sees this as common to people’s experience of COVID-19, which delayed the exhibition.
“I hope that visitors will find their own ways to understand their medicalised lives through the art and other material objects presented.”
Exploring new paths: a moment to reflect
Allison wants to give herself, the exhibition, and others time to reflect on its impact.
“The opportunity of a 10-year collaborative project is extraordinary, and I've made a conscious decision at this stage of my career not to leap into the next project because I want to support Lifeblood in having its own life in the world.”
Her suggestion to recent graduates looking to get into the arts sector echoes this: take the time to reflect on each experience.
“Seize any opportunity in the arts you can, but also take the time to ask critical questions about those opportunities. That’s my best advice.”
She recommends university work in the arts, based on her own experience at Cambridge and beyond.
“In university-based institutions, research and academic collaboration are prioritised. Also, university museums are usually smaller, so you can end up doing a little bit of everything.”
The world of art may feel distant, even intimidating, for those not already intimately involved in it. But Allison’s journey from Canada to Cambridge, from a passion for art and music to an exhibition in Norway, demonstrates that art is international—and for everyone.
Allison’s work fostering new public conversations about health and care through modern art is grounded in the independent thinking and collaborative mindset she built at Cambridge.