A Dollhouse, a Sweater, Poems and Paintings: Medical Campus Creativity on Display at 35th Annual Art Days

Fifth-year MD/PhD student Kristen Segars has knitted hundreds of items in the three years since she joined a Medical Campus knitting club. Her palette tends toward bright colors like the explosion of patterns and color in the knit dress she hung at the 2023 Art Days, an annual two-day exhibition of student, faculty and staff artwork from across the Boston University Medical Campus.

For this year’s artistic event, held on Feb. 17-18 in Hiebert Lounge, with 31 artists displaying more than 70 pieces of artwork, Segars was inspired to do something different. Under a pattern of white snowflakes, Segars’ Fair Isles knit sweater exudes the muted, earthy tones and deep shadows of the winter marshlands and forests she saw from her train window as she commuted from Boston to her clinical rotation at a North Shore family health clinic.

“I wanted a snowflake sweater, but not like a Christmas sweater. I wanted it to be like winter,” said Segars, who chose a thick organic wool from a local farm for most of the sweater.
Segars, who is considering ophthalmology as her specialty, likes being able to turn her brain off.

“You’re not having to memorize a whole list of enzymes,” she said. “It’s just nice to have something in your life that’s not science and medicine.”

Louis Gerstenfeld, PhD’82, professor of orthopaedic surgery, knows that feeling. His work focuses the gene expression of cells that play crucial roles in bone remodeling.

But on the weekends, you’re likely to find him tuning out the world, reveling in the tactile experience of smearing graphite with a finger to get just the right shadow on a landscape, bird or human figure. Gerstenfeld used to paint, but for a long time he’s been drawn to pastels.
“I think it’s the workability of the media. It’s very tactile,” he said. One of his three works on display at Art Days was a blue heron standing in shallow water, crisply delineated in thick black lines, standing out against a wash of marsh and trees.

“It’s primarily a way to relax and create something, as well,” said Gerstenfeld.

“This is my work-life balance,” said Keith Tornheim, PhD, with a wry smile, as he pointed to an assemblage of lab equipment and children’s blocks that spelled out “Work” and “Life,” all balanced on a carpenter’s level on a lab stand.

“I thought it would be highly appropriate,” he said of his artwork. An associate professor of biochemistry & cell biology, Tornheim has served as the facilitator for Art Days for more than 20 years.

As a child in her native Russia, Anna Parfenenkova, a research fellow in computational biology, was in an art club. While she used to paint, limitations of space and time mean Parfenenkova’s art is now mainly done with paper and a thin pen. The pen and ink illustrations she submitted to Art Days included a snail and a crayfish, each meticulously rendered in layers of thin black lines and took about five to six hours to execute, Parfenenkova said.

“Mostly, I do it when I need to relax or interrupt my thoughts about something,” she said.

Fiona Schicho has always liked tiny things. Enrolled in an MSW/MPH dual degree program, she loves creating miniatures and used to accompany her grandmother to a museum that had an exhibit of intricate, detailed dollhouses.

“I always admired them,” she said, and has been working on one large dollhouse since she was in middle school. Sometimes, she’ll go to Facebook Marketplace and pick up someone’s old project, a dilapidated dollhouse that’s been in their basement for 30 years, and finish it herself.

“I’m not submitting the dollhouse (to Art Days) because it’s too big to transport,” Schicho said. Instead, she put one of the rooms on display. She incorporates found objects like small pieces of wood and fabric, even the condiment lids from Chinese takeout that she repurposes as trays, into her construction.

Schicho is not concerned about what is considered art and what isn’t.

“I’m creating the dollhouse because I enjoy looking at it,” she said. “That’s my inspiration.”