Where medicine meets artistry
By any measure, the Transit Gallery at Harvard Medical School (HMS) is an eccentric space for viewing art. It has a checkered floor and cream-colored walls and takes up 50 yards of busy corridor in the basement of Gordon Hall. Improbably, Harvard’s youngest art gallery is part of an interior walkway connecting buildings on the School’s famous quadrangle. The pedestrians moving through it are not ordinary gallery-goers either. These bustling students, brisk professors, and harried lab technicians are usually in a hurry. But the gallery’s latest show — “Phantom Limbs and Nostalgic Technologies,” up through April 9 — relays a longtime artistic plea: Slow down. Look. Imagine. Imagine, for instance, the ways that art and science are alike. “A lot of what happens in a lab is about trial and error, and repeatedly trying and not seeing results,” the same as in an artist’s studio, said exhibitor Deb Todd Wheeler. “Persevering in the...