Humans of the Art Museum – States of Health Exhibit

Dionne is an Operations Research and Financial Engineering major at Princeton University. She came to the Princeton University Art Museum this weekend with her boyfriend, Kevin, who graduated last year. With Kevin visiting from New York, Dionne wondered, “What can we do on campus that’s something different?” and the museum immediately came to mind.

Dionne finds that visiting the museum with someone who is no longer a student on campus makes her better appreciate the free and convenient access to the museum’s collections. The European Gallery is her favorite section of the museum.

Art doesn’t normally fit into Dionne and Kevin’s academic interests, but they were drawn to the States of Health exhibit because Kevin is applying to medical school. Dionne was fascinated by the paintings about the bubonic plague. She said, “I like the descriptions because they help me understand them. I personally don’t look at art and immediately get the meaning myself. It was very striking how one of them was saying how the artist couldn’t draw all the things that would really come with the bubonic plague because you’re supposed to keep the paintings to some degree of classy, and so they would have to depict it in other ways that weren’t the actual symptoms of the bubonic plague. That was really cool to me.”

Here Dionne is next to her favorite painting of the States of Health exhibit: The Pestilence of 1656, by Carlo Coppola.

Post by Isabel Griffith-Gorgati ’21.