Medical Humanities Research Workshop: The Lost Lineage of Edith Stein on your Wall
424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford, CA 94305
With guest speaker Catherine Fairbanks (Artist and Nurse)
This is an introduction to Fairbanks’ work as an artist and nurse in Los Angeles and the case for art in multiple landscapes (clinical and aesthetic) as a space of resuscitation for Stein’s ideas of equality. Empathy and its appearance as a foundational structure in living process, is the bridge between her practice as an artist and her practice as a nurse. In both roles she is in dialogue with the early 20th century phenomenologist, Edith Stein. For Stein, empathy was the liberating recognition of infinite difference, not similarity, in the other. This is not empathy as feeling, this is empathy enacted socially as equality.
Speaker Bio: Catherine Fairbanks is an artist and nurse in Los Angeles. Fairbanks received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and has since attended national and international residencies including Salmon Creed Farm, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, National Textile Institute in Iceland, and the Wool Factory in Barcelona. Ground-shifting exhibitions of the past 5 years include the premier of Chimney Dances, a four site collaborative work with Dylan Crossman, formerly of Merce Cunningham Dance Company, at the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, UCLA, and Pieter Space in February of 2020; a solo painting exhibition, Love Loves to Love Love, Nurse Loves the New Chemist at ACP in Los Angeles, Spring 2023. Her first institutional two-person exhibition with poet Catherine Barnett of NYU opened Fall 2024, curated by Nicole Seisler of A-B Projects and Lewis and Clark College. Fairbanks has received critical acclaim in Artforum, der Freitag, CARLA, SFMOMA Openspace, Thich Press, and Artillery.