{"id":132325,"date":"2025-02-27T19:09:37","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T23:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/?post_type=bu-article&p=132325"},"modified":"2025-04-18T15:28:59","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T19:28:59","slug":"a-dollhouse-a-sweater-poems-and-paintings-medical-campus-creativity-on-display-at-35th-annual-art-days","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/news-events\/articles\/2025\/a-dollhouse-a-sweater-poems-and-paintings-medical-campus-creativity-on-display-at-35th-annual-art-days\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dollhouse, a Sweater, Poems and Paintings: Medical Campus Creativity on Display at 35th Annual Art Days"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tA Dollhouse, a Sweater, Poems and Paintings: Medical Campus Creativity on Display at 35th Annual Art Days\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t\n
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February 27, 2025<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
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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<\/a>, an annual two-day exhibition of student, faculty and staff artwork from across the Boston University Medical Campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"handknit<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For this year\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI wanted a snowflake sweater, but not like a Christmas sweater. I wanted it to be like winter,\u201d said Segars, who chose a thick organic wool from a local farm for most of the sweater.
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Segars, who is considering ophthalmology as her specialty, likes being able to turn her brain off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not having to memorize a whole list of enzymes,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s just nice to have something in your life that\u2019s not science and medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Louis Gerstenfeld, PhD’82<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Louis Gerstenfeld<\/a>, PhD\u201982, professor of orthopaedic surgery, knows that feeling. His work focuses the gene expression of cells that play crucial roles in bone remodeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But on the weekends, you\u2019re 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\u2019s been drawn to pastels.
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\u201cI think it\u2019s the workability of the media. It\u2019s very tactile,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s primarily a way to relax and create something, as well,\u201d said Gerstenfeld.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is my work-life balance,\u201d said Keith Tornheim<\/a>, PhD, with a wry smile, as he pointed to an assemblage of lab equipment and children\u2019s blocks that spelled out \u201cWork\u201d and \u201cLife,\u201d all balanced on a carpenter\u2019s level on a lab stand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI thought it would be highly appropriate,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMostly, I do it when I need to relax or interrupt my thoughts about something,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI always admired them,\u201d she said, and has been working on one large dollhouse since she was in middle school. Sometimes, she\u2019ll go to Facebook Marketplace and pick up someone\u2019s old project, a dilapidated dollhouse that\u2019s been in their basement for 30 years, and finish it herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI\u2019m not submitting the dollhouse (to Art Days) because it\u2019s too big to transport,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schicho is not concerned about what is considered art and what isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m creating the dollhouse because I enjoy looking at it,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s my inspiration.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Art helps students, faculty and staff attain a work-life balance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22573,"featured_media":131195,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[426,414,392,358,405],"bu-publication":[367],"medicine-article-category":[],"medicine-topic":[],"news-article-category":[384],"news-topic":[],"bu_edition":[390],"media_type":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/132325"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22573"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132325"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/132325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133436,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/132325\/revisions\/133436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132325"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=132325"},{"taxonomy":"medicine-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/medicine-article-category?post=132325"},{"taxonomy":"medicine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/medicine-topic?post=132325"},{"taxonomy":"news-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article-category?post=132325"},{"taxonomy":"news-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-topic?post=132325"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=132325"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=132325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}