The intersection of art and science: Laura Spector

Graphic by UTHealth Houston

For Laura Spector, art is a way to explore the stories people carry, especially those that can be difficult to put into words.

As resident artist at the John P. McGovern, MD, Center for Humanities and Ethics at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, Spector brings her perspective as a visual artist into healthcare, creating opportunities for students, physicians, researchers, faculty, staff, and community members to pause, reflect, observe, and connect.

“The artwork that I am most interested in always has a story behind it,” Spector said. “Whether it’s a personal story or one that has affected me, art is a vehicle for telling stories, especially the ones that are difficult to talk about or don’t have easy answers.”

A lifelong connection to medicine

Spector’s connection to medicine began early. Her father worked in pharmacy, her mother was a medical technician, and her brother studied DNA sequencing.

That familial connection eventually found its way into her artwork, which often explores the human body and the stories it can hold.

Spector has taught art for about 30 years, beginning when she lived in Thailand. It continued after she returned to the United States. For her, teaching and creating are inseparable.

“Teaching is completely intrinsic to my art practice,” she said.

Her path to McGovern Medical School began with an idea for a drawing class for surgeons. Spector wanted to help surgeons reconnect with hands-on skills as technology increasingly became part of their work. A former student, Anson Koshy, MD, suggested another possibility: joining the McGovern Medical School cohort as a resident artist.

Asking questions through art

For Spector, the connection between art and medicine goes beyond painting or drawing. Both require people to observe closely, ask questions, and be willing to sit with uncertainty.

“Art is always asking questions,” she said. “It lets you sit with a question without necessarily knowing the answer. You can get it wrong, go back, look again, and revise.”

She sees that same process in the education of medical students.

“When I’m teaching medical students, I realize that many of the questions I ask in my own art practice are the same questions they’re asking,” she said. “What are our biases? How do we sit with an uncomfortable truth? How do we look closely enough to even know what questions to ask?”

Finding new ways to communicate

One of Spector’s most memorable experiences with students came through a class called “Painting Your Inner Clown.” The exercise challenged medical students preparing for residency to step outside their comfort zones and explore personal stories through art.

“The first day they came into my studio, I told them we weren’t going to introduce ourselves in the usual way. I gave everyone a clown nose and asked them to tell their life story to the person across from them—without using words. That’s how they met.”

The exercise led to what Spector described as “massive breakthroughs.” Students discovered that artistic expressions could help them communicate difficult experiences and explore parts of their stories in ways they had not experienced before.

“They had these epiphanies where they realized, ‘I can communicate really hard things through art. I can tell this part of my story—and maybe even begin to work through it—in a way I’ve never tried before.’”

Making space before burnout

Spector’s work also explores the importance of creating space away from the demands of daily life. Her multidisciplinary project, “Burnout: A Music & Picture Show,” combines paintings, music, and storytelling to explore the emotional realities of burnout through the perspectives of an artist and healthcare professionals.

“At the base of everything I’m doing is the idea of giving people space to recapture some of their time, center themselves, and create for themselves,” she said. “Nobody has to see what you make, and you certainly don’t have to become a professional artist.”

Spector encourages people to find simple ways to make room for creativity, whether through drawing, journaling, or simply observing the world around them. She believes that creative practices and self-care can help people build habits that support them before burnout takes hold.

“Self-care doesn’t have to be something elaborate. It can be something you make space for, even for a few moments at a time.”

Spector has found evidence of that tradition within medicine itself. When she first arrived at McGovern Medical School as resident artist, she discovered illustration books created by doctors and surgeons.

“It made me think about the ways physicians have always found creative outlets alongside their medical practice,” she said. “They were taking care of their patients, but they were also making space to draw, observe, and take care of themselves.”

Creativity belongs to everyone

Although Spector’s work at McGovern Medical School is closely connected to medical education and healthcare, she sees creativity as something that extends far beyond the medical field.

When “Burnout: A Music & Picture Show” was presented at The Health Museum, she said audience members of different ages, backgrounds, and professions connected with the experience.

“Burnout reaches across every demographic, and I think that’s why people from very different backgrounds could see something of themselves in the work,” she added.

Her own artistic career has included exhibitions nationally and internationally. She is a Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts and has received two Individual Grant Awards from the Houston Arts Alliance, as well as a residency with the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Her current body of work, “Personal Stories,” explores resilience, transformation, grief, identity, medicine, and the complexity of being human.

For nearly three decades, Spector has also worked on “Museum Anatomy,” an ongoing project in which she reimagines lost and stolen works of art by painting them onto the human body and figure casts. The project uses the body as both a surface and a way of bringing these absent artworks, and the stories surrounding them, back into view.

She also is preparing for “Museum Anatomy – War,” a solo exhibition scheduled for 2028 at Holocaust Museum Houston.

For Spector, however, creativity is about more than professional art.

“I think creativity is a baseline for being human,” she said. “It allows us to learn more about who we are, where we fit into the world, how we relate to the people around us, and how we might make things better.”

That belief is at the heart of Spector’s work at UTHealth Houston: creating space for people to slow down, ask questions, and connect with experiences that can be difficult to express.