The Department of Visual Arts Welcomes Eric Avery

Public Lecture
November 16th, 2022
Fletcher Hall Room 134
5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Erik Avery is an artist/printmaker who became a physician during the Vietnam War in the 1970s. In 1974, he received his medical degree from The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas and then in 1978 completed his psychiatry training at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City. For forty years he has worked at the intersection of visual art and medicine, leaving the practice of medicine several times to concentrate on his art career.

For twenty years, he worked as the HIV psychiatrist at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, Texas. He has a long association with the Institute for Medical Humanities (IMH) at UTMB and from 1992 – 2012 while at UTMB, he made prints, paper and art actions that reflected his clinical work with HIV/AIDS. In the 1990s, in clinical art actions that high lighted developments in HIV care, he moved HIV medical practice into the protected aesthetic art space of museums and galleries, trying to prove that art can save lives. He retired from his clinical practice in 2012 to focus on his art medicine and collaborative projects. He remains Associate Professor Emeritus at the IMH after moving from Texas to New Hope, Pennsylvania in 2012. His social content prints explore issues such as Human Rights Abuses, and Social Responses to Disease (specifically HIV and Emerging Infectious Diseases), Death, Sexuality and the Body. His body of work is more thoroughly represented at www.docart.com.

​In 2019, after six years in New Hope, Pennsylvania he moved back to San Ygnacio, Texas, two blocks from the Rio Grande, thirty miles down the Texas-Mexico border from Laredo. He continues to make art and develop art medicine projects. You can see more of his work at: ericaveryartist.com.

Marais Press
Eric Avery will be in the printmaking studio working with Brian Kelly and his printmaking students, editioning a lithograph/woodcut edition all week November 16th – 18th. Eric also has work on display in the Dean's Gallery, Fletcher Hall throughout November 2022.