Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays 11:00am–5:00pm, Thursdays 11:00am–7:00pm, Saturdays 12:00pm–5:00pm, closed Sundays and Mondays
Location: Alvin A. Lee Building, University Avenue, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON L8S 4L6
Access: Open to the McMaster community and the general public
Telephone: 905-525-9140 ext. 23081
Email: museum@mcmaster.ca
Website address: http://museum.mcmaster.ca
The McMaster Museum of Art (MMA) opened in 1994 and houses the University’s permanent collection of almost 6,000 works (paintings, photographs, and sculptures), including European art from the 1600s to the present, as well as Indigenous and contemporary Canadian pieces. The internationally recognized strengths of its collection include early 20th-century German Expressionist prints and European paintings, drawings, and prints; visit the Museum’s website for an introduction to the main collections. The Museum’s website includes a searchable database of its ten collections: the Herman H. Levy Collection of more than 185 European and American works of art and the Levy Bequest Purchases; American Art; Antiquities; Asian Art; Canadian Art; English Art; First Nations; German Expressionism; Inuit Collection; and the Bruce Brace Online Roman Coin Collection.
Art is a way to explore society’s attitudes towards medicine, medical practices, and medical practitioners over time (consider Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty; the greatest cruelty is human dissection). Art gives us access to individual experience of the body and alternate views of the body, the processes of cognition, of sight, and the experience of the emotions. Historical paintings and lithographs can portray public health conditions, clothing, and food practices at particular times and places. Art also conveys cultural views (and fears) of illness. For mental health professionals, art is especially rich to explore identity, self-expression, and therapy. Just a few among the many themes that art can help medical professionals to think about:
- Depression and mental illness
- Representations of mother and child, maternity and family relationships
- Poverty
- Death
- Multiple ways of seeing, ways of knowing, ways of speaking
- Development of empathy
- Isolation (quarantine) and space
- Cognition, memory, the brain, and thinking
- Language
- The Body
In transforming from an art gallery to a museum of art, the MMA has emphasized learning and research. In addition to issuing numerous publications and mounting a number of ongoing and temporary exhibitions, the Museum also offers tours of the Museum’s artwork for instructional purposes, like the Art of Seeing (TM) visual literacy course for Residents of McMaster University’s Department of Family Medicine. The aim of this course is to nourish the development of empathetic and reflective doctors who are better able to engage with their patients in more comprehensive ways. For more information about the Art of Seeing program please contact Dr. Joyce Zazulak or Nicole Knibb.