ARTS 275 Art, Ethics and Medicine: The PPE Portrait Project in Action

In this course, students will activate their own project site of the PPE Portrait Project. The PPE Portrait Project is an interdisciplinary social practice art project that is transforming best medical practice.  Created in 2014 by Occidental College professor Mary Beth Heffernan in response to the Ebola epidemic, the PPE Portrait Project is now supporting COVID care across the US and beyond.  The project humanizes anonymous masked healthcare workers with wearable portraits affixed to the outside of their hazmat suits. Students will be encouraged to implement the project in a group with whom they have a meaningful connection, including schools, community groups; any group who would benefit from an enhanced human connection at a time of masked distancing, anonymity and faceless interaction. 

At the heart of the PPE Portrait Project is the centrality of the image, and the role of images of the face in generating empathy, compassion and ethical behavior. With widespread facemask use on our horizon for the foreseeable future, the need to address the isolation and alienation caused by faceless person-to-person exchange is expanding beyond the urgent need of hospitals. Precipitated by social media before the pandemic, and now exacerbated by the coronavirus, we are experiencing an "epidemic of facelessness."  

Students will use community based learning methods to ethically engage with a group, and innovate with the PPE Portrait Project tenets and materials to best meet the needs of the community partner.