New FML exhibit features more than 50 works by Ann E. Fink, with an artist’s talk, reception, and workshops planned for September.

Lehigh Libraries are pleased to welcome a new art exhibition to Fairchild-Martindale Library: a collection of drawings, paintings, and published comics by artist, neuroscientist, therapist, educator, and ethicist Dr. Ann E. Fink. The exhibit is part of the Friends of the Lehigh University Libraries programming, with an artist’s talk, reception, and workshops scheduled for September.

In Study to Story: Graphic Narrative from Life, installed throughout the study space on the sixth floor south, Fink brings together more than 50 works representing over 15 years of studying and interpreting people, places, and the natural world through movement, space, and character. Moving between realism and abstraction and across a variety of styles and media, Fink approaches drawing from life as more than an exercise in capturing what is seen. For her, it is a way of looking closely, shifting perspectives, and coming to understand a person or place in a particular moment. That process becomes especially relational in her figure studies.

“To know people, it helps to draw them,” Fink said. “Draw them until they are truly subjects in action.”

That attention to agency and subjectivity is central to the works in Study to Story. Fink describes life study as both technical and relational, an inquiry into the multidimensional presence of a subject. Their figures are not simply objects of study or observation, but subjects in their own right, looking and acting. Across their body of work, Fink explores people and places through moments of change, loss, growth, illness, health, and transformation, continually shifting perspectives and returning to them over time.

“Art has been present in my life since I could hold a crayon. By drawing and redrawing the world, I have come to understand it differently across time and media, allowing the subjectivity and life of people and places to take the lead in creation,” Fink said. “With that understanding, I find that I can better tell important stories and hear the stories of others.”

Art, science, and storytelling

Fink’s approach to art reflects an unusually interdisciplinary career. She earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCLA, where her research began at the micro level with the study of neurophysiology, memory, and plasticity. Fink completed postdoctoral work at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and the Center for Neural Science at NYU. They later taught Feminist Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and served for three years as a Professor of Practice in Biological Sciences at Lehigh University. They continue to teach Behavioral Neuroscience in Lehigh’s College of Education. It is precisely this synthesis of science, art, and teaching—and how it encourages viewers to think—that makes Fink’s work especially resonant at Lehigh, according to Boaz Nadav-Manes, University Librarian.

“Ann Fink plays with the unstable boundary between subject and object, between looking and being looked at,” Nadav-Manes said. Their figures, he noted, can gaze back at viewers, hide from them, or turn objects into tools for seeing.

“The result is playful, funny, and slightly unsettling: who is looking at whom?” he said.

But Nadav-Manes sees the exhibition as doing more than asking viewers to look.

“Through drawing and comics, we can give form to thoughts, emotions, and experiences that words alone cannot always reach,” he said. “That connection between creativity and well-being is especially powerful in a library. Libraries are not only places where we encounter knowledge; they are places where we encounter ourselves and one another.”

He hopes visitors will carry that spirit into the exhibition’s workshops as well. “Come look, draw, play, and make,” he said. “You may leave seeing things, and perhaps yourself, a little differently.”

That personal reflection mirrors Fink's day-to-day practice outside the gallery. As a licensed social worker and psychotherapist specializing in LGBTQ+-affirming care, chronic illness, trauma, and interpersonal relationships, Fink brings clinical experience to questions of health, identity, and the social systems that shape well-being. Their scientific, clinical, and educational work continually informs their art, just as their artistic practice enriches and shapes those other areas of their work. Art, they say, has been the binding thread across them all.

That convergence is especially visible in Fink’s work within Graphic Medicine, an interdisciplinary field that uses comics and graphic narrative to explore experiences of health and illness. Informed by the rhetoric of health and medicine, Fink uses comics in teaching, scholarship, and clinical education to examine subjects ranging from learning, memory, and affect to the ethics of neuroscience, identity, mental health, and social justice.

In Study to Story, the relationship between life study and graphic narrative becomes part of the exhibition itself. Fink’s lifelong study, artistic and otherwise, provides a foundation for their published comics and graphic narratives. Those narratives consider people not in isolation, but within the relationships, circumstances, and social worlds that shape their experiences.

The value of slow making

The exhibition also makes a case for the value of the handmade. Fink works in watercolor, acrylic paint, ink, marker, cut paper, and other media, and increasingly values tactile, hand-constructed work as a source of connection within an increasingly technological landscape.

“This is a slow, manual creation informed by a commitment, attention and care to the subjects inhabiting a years-long visual story,” Fink said. “These human qualities are irreplaceable and the process cannot be rushed.”

In an era in which, as Fink puts it, “speed and artificiality hold attention hostage,” Study to Story offers another possibility: sustained observation, repeated looking, and the stories that become possible when time is taken to see and understand.

The Friends of the Lehigh University Libraries support programming that enhances the Libraries and creates opportunities for the Lehigh community to engage with artists, scholars, collections, and ideas. Watch for details about the artist’s upcoming talk, reception, and workshops.

Study to Story: Graphic Narrative from Life is on view through spring semester, 2027.