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::Who Is Eric Avery?
Side View of My Brain - Baby Eric Avery - Medical School Galveston, 1970 - 1974 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Doctor   - 1980 Las Dhure Refugee Camp, Somalia photo: Wolfgang Starke, M.D.  - Condom Head, 1981 Photo: R. Haile - Use Your Head, Use a Condom, 1981 Photo: Roger Haile	Born 1948 Milwaukee, Wisconsin Raised in Pecos, Texas Bachelor of Art, University of Arizona, 1970 Medical Doctor, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, 1974 Psychiatry Residency, New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York City, 1979 Medical Director, Las Dhure Refugee Camp, Somalia, 1979-1980 Lived San Ygnacio, Texas, 1980-1992 Currently living and working in Galveston, Texas Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Associate Member of The Institute for the Medical Humanities at The University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas For thirty years he has made prints, paper and worked as a physician and psychiatrist. His social content prints explore issues such as human rights abuses, and social responses to disease (HIV and Emerging Infectious Diseases), death, sexuality and the body. His art medicine actions have given form to the liminal space between art and medicine. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and his prints are in many collections, including the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, The Library of Congress, ARS Medica Collection at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Art, the National Library of Medicine, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University School of Medicine. In England, work is included in The Wellcome Trust Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine.       I first met Dr. Eric Avery through a letter from Somalia. He was working as a doctor in a refugee camp with thousands of human beings who were starving to death. A photograph in Life magazine shows Eric in the middle of the camp that stretched for miles, a figure at dusk holding up a tiny baby into the light, silhouetted by dusty tents. It was there that Eric started to make woodcuts—to record the terrible sights he had seen and, as his scalpel cut into the wood, as therapy.     If you are fortunate enough to be a friend of Eric’s, you will receive woodcut cards of plants and birds, shells and trees, as purely and simply illustrated as engravings by the 19th-century British naturalist Thomas Bewick. That would be sufficient for most artists, but for Eric, harsh truth is as urgently beautiful.     Eric uses science and art in tandem to heal. He transmutes the chaff of suffering into art. Eric always says “life before art” as he plunges into healing the victims of society wherever he finds them—in crack houses, on death row—refugees on the broken borders of life or death, the poor, the abandoned. They become alive in his art; their content creates his form.     His work as an artist/psychiatrist treating patients with HIV has become a document of historical record and is as sophisticated and powerful as any Dürer woodcut. It is the antibody to our disease of distance. Dominant culture flattens all experience, rendering reality into irony. We no longer trust ourselves to experience life directly. Eric makes art in the tradition of reportage; there is a direct emotional involvement with his subjects, a witnessing that is devoid of sentiment. The humility of small woodcuts depicting faces of cherished patients, printed on paper that is made from hospital sheets or the clothing of AIDS orphans, subverts and unravels the dominant social ideology of power and superiority. - Sue Coe, artist and author/illustrator www.graphicwitness.org	Looking Down MRI View of My Brain - The Stuff of Life, 1996 Photo: J. Glowczwski - 1997 Fogg Art Museum Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts Photo: Harvard Crimson  - HIV Condom Filled Pinata, 1997 Photo: S. Nussenblat - Photo: J. Glowczwski - 2003 Bill Lagatutta, Master Printer Tamarind Institute, and Eric Avery at 3rd Impact Print Conference, Cape Town, South Africa -