We have stories.
Artist Residency Program
The Mobile Medical Museum Artist Residency Program offers visual, literary and performing artists the opportunity to apply their creative work to the education of health care students and professionals, through a timely and resonant exploration of the past, present and future of health care.
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Artists spend several weeks in an extensive engagement with the Museum's collection to develop new work that addresses the history of health care in our region. At the end of the residency, the artist will present the new work in an exhibition, performance, or other public program coordinated by the Museum. Each artist-in-residence receives an honorarium and budget for project expenses.
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For 2026, the Museum is collaborating with Alabama Contemporary Art Center on the Artist Residency Program. The application period is now closed.
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​​This program has been made possible in part by a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
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Current and Past Artists in Residence
2025: Miriam Calleja
Blindspot: Unaccounted Bodies—Missed Opportunities in Women’s Healthcare
What does it mean to live with a body that the medical world has chosen not to see?
For decades, clinical trials, pharmaceutical research, and surgical practices privileged the so-called “reference male”—white, cisgender, and presumed universal. The consequences are profound: women’s bodies have been left out of the experiment, absent from the data, and thus unaccounted for in the design of drugs, devices, and even the protocols of care. My work engages with these absences—the missed opportunities, the paths not taken, the untold stories.
Each collage in this exhibition is intentionally constructed from medical texts and everyday ephemera from the heart of Mobile. Playing cards represent the chances women take with their bodies when they navigate a world made for men. These fragments—layered, torn, folded, and reassembled—mirror the medical histories of women: incomplete, erased, reconstructed in the face of neglect. Materials are drawn from the natural world and the language of science, creating a tension between what has been measured and what has been ignored.
The twofold disadvantage facing women in healthcare is both structural and speculative. First, the world—its drugs, therapies, and interventions—has been designed for men. Second, when chemicals failed to perform for “the male body,” they were discarded, their potential for women never glimpsed. Treatments that might have transformed female lives are lost to us, rendered unknowable by scientific oversight. How long is this game of peek-a-boo going to last?
Despite changes in Federal law in 1993 that made inclusion of women mandatory, exclusion criteria for these trials (for women as well as under-represented groups) keep the representation of women blurry.
Inequities reverberate in lived experience: women are more likely to suffer adverse drug reactions, wait longer for diagnoses, and receive inadequate care in emergency settings. The medical system’s failure to adapt has had real, embodied consequences. To address this legacy would require more than incremental fixes; it would demand a thorough reimagining of science, care, and design itself.
This exhibition is both a testament to resilience and a call to reckoning. By piecing together what history has left out, I hope to foster recognition—a space for seeing, listening, and ultimately, for change.
—Miriam Calleja
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2024: Douglas Baulos
Alabama: Midnight Full of Stars
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My 2024 residency at the Mobile Medical Museum allowed me to dive into new kinds of research questions about endemic medicinal plants of Baldwin and Mobile County, provide unorthodox visual and physical interpretations of my results, explore and articulate wide-ranging implications of my research into southeastern humble medical practices and sutures, and communicate and create artwork that combines my interests in mending, medicinal plant history, and natural dyes.” I made the paper, upcycled and foraged for cloth from dumpsters and thrift stores, made the dyes, emulsions, paints, and inks from plant material sustainably foraged in South Alabama for this body or work.
Blood Root-Sanguinaria Candensis
Blackberry-Rubrus Argutus
Dogwood-Cornus Florida
Dandelion-Teraxacum Erythrosperum
Passionflower-Passiflora Incarnata
Wild Yam - Discorea
Sumac-Rhus Glabra
Elderberry-Sambucus Candensis
Skullcap-Scutellaria Glabriusunla
Goldenrod-Solidago
Magnolia-Magnolia Grandiflora
Yaupon Holly-Ilex Vomitoria
I consider the natural world not only as a source of inspiration or subject to represent, but also as a realm to influence directly—a sphere of action to transform and improve our lives through creative means - I make visual and conceptual links between the use, foraging and storage of medicinal plants with images like stars, snakes, and webs. My research lies at the intersection where scientific understanding, emotional experience and diverse realities and histories exist and it's physically and conceptually very grounded in place. As a queer person in Alabama, I want to assert how natural it is for my body, community to occupy and commune with a landscape that is often associated with heteronormativity and a bifurcated understanding of identity. I hope to explode these ideas into an embodied visual and written narrative, an environment of shared inner life and concerns that showcases my intimate connection to the natural world and the deep south while also illuminating the diversity of who has been here all along. I am very interested in creating works that extend ontologies between things that are seemingly irrelevant to one another to create new theories, language, or artifacts to create a common ground of reflection and understanding, while fostering equitable and inclusive opportunities through public workshops and conversations. I’m most interested in creating situations where I am expanding our human experience of plants through education, dialogue, and creativity et al. Stories, cloth, and books are so important to me because they are universal, establish our place in the world, aid us in acting wisely, help us to understand others, and pass down knowledge. As an author and writer, I make work that hopes to instill joy and fragile exultation at the beauty of the world, which can for queer people be an act of resistance.
—Douglas Baulos