The Road Less Traveled at the Monmouth Museum
Emerging Artists Series
Brookdale Community College Campus (Parking Lot 1)
Hours: Tuesdays – Sundays, 10AM – 4PM (Closed Mondays)
Opening Reception: 4:00 – 6:00 PM, June 16, 2024
The Doctors’ Artist
By Marie Maber
Nancie Gunkelman has been a practicing artist for over fifty years. To some it might seem ironic that her paintings will be on view as part of the annual “Emerging Artist Series” at the Monmouth Museum, located on the campus of Brookdale Community College. However, it is a very appropriate venue for her. “It is the first time I’ll have an exhibition in a museum,” she said, indicating the offer of a solo show at the Monmouth Museum is an honor that will bring a new audience and higher level of recognition to her paintings.
Nancie Gunkelman lives in Monroe Township, New Jersey. She was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens, where she attended PS1 Elementary School. Ironically, over the years, PS1 has morphed into a major art museum, MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) PS1.
Gunkelman has academic degrees in both fine arts and sciences. She entered The Peace Corps in the early 1970s, having been recruited as a medical illustrator to design educational materials for Nairobi’s Medical Training Center in Kenya. She has used her education to help people in rural areas in various parts of the world. “I went on to work on health education programs in other developing countries, Somalia, Nigeria, Jamaica, São Tomé e Príncipé,” she said.
In an early opportunity to work as a medical illustrator, Gunkelman had a wonderful job at the San Francisco Veterans’ Hospital. She had her own office and attracted many visitors. “Doctors and researchers would come to me for illustrations of surgical techniques to study their details. I was there to illustrate whatever new surgical techniques they needed. When they needed to communicate their scientific findings, they would come to me to provide visual illustrations to communicate with other researchers or the public. As the doctors there would ask for specific anatomic views, I would call up the pathologists to say, “The next time you have an autopsy, call me up so I can draw it.”
As she has lived in areas of Africa where thick, heavily illustrated medical textbooks did not exist, she found ways to provide necessary imaging for Peace Corp Doctors by drawing the internal organs of human anatomy through her close study of recently dissected human corpses.
Her works of art did not only involve anatomical studies, however. “I enjoyed working overseas on a variety of health education programs and agricultural initiatives,” she said. Sometimes she’d create pamphlets to illustrate ways of fabricating simple agricultural tools with local resources. “We found novel ways to visually communicate with people who were not literate,” she explained.
Nancie Gunkelman spent years drawing wide-ranging themes for teaching various professionals. “In Somalia, my task was to write a pamphlet on midwifery and another for village health workers,” she said. “My professional life over many decades was primarily to provide vitally important, detailed medical illustrations for doctors within educational settings in underserved areas around the world.”
When asked about her previous exhibitions, she recalled an important show of her work on view for only a single day. “It was the day that Rutgers University celebrated The Peace Corps,” she said. To add context to this story, please note that President John F. Kennedy signed the Peace Corps Act into Law, March 1, 1961, the same year that Congress had formalized it via legislation. Sargent Shriver initiated service training for volunteers. “The first group was trained at Rutgers for service in Colombia. A later group went to Ghana,” Gunkelman said. “In the beginning the Peace Corps did not include women, but after a while they reversed that exclusion.”
Today Ms. Gunkelman happily lives in Monroe Township with her husband. This environment must deeply satisfy something within her as her current paintings are masterful, fascinating works of art.