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.
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.
Since 2026, the Museum has offered our artist residency program in partnership with Alabama Contemporary Art Center, as part of Alabama AIR. For more information, please visit the Alabama AIR website.
Current and Past Artists in Residence
2026: Will Truran
Evidence of Care
Modern medicine exists in a state of tension. The same disposable tools that protect lives, gloves snapped on before an incision, masks worn through a twelve-hour shift, needles used once and sealed away, become objects without purpose the moment care is delivered. This exhibition sits inside that contradiction, asking what we owe to the materials that make safety possible, and what they cost the world once their work is done.
Evidence of Care is in three parts:
First, a new iteration of the ongoing project trashFiles.net: disposable medical materials collected across Mobile, Alabama, during the week of June 8th, 3D-scanned and documented where they were found.
Second, a material history comparing today's single-use tools to those of the past, making the case that disposability is not carelessness but a hard-won response to infection, contamination, and human error.
Third, testimony from the medical community itself: the people who reach for these tools every day, who understand their necessity, and who are already imagining what comes next.
—Will Truran
This project is a partnership between Mobile Medical Museum and Alabama Contemporary Art Center for Alabama AIR, a statewide partnership residency program. The project has been made possible by grants from Alabama State Council on the Arts and The Daniel Foundation of Alabama. Additional support is provided by Mobile County Commission and Dr. Charles B. Rodning.
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
The project has been made possible by grants from Alabama State Council on the Arts. Additional support is provided by Mobile County Commission and Dr. Charles B. Rodning.