Research Guides: Center for Teaching and Learning Research Guide: Trauma Informed Pedagogy: Contemporary Examples

Trauma Informed Art

Artists working in a variety of mediums and styles have engaged the topic of trauma in numerous ways. From Attic tragedy through twenty-first century performance, trauma--personal, historical, and cultural--continues to inform how artists reckon with the past, confront the present, and imagine the future.

Below, you will discover just a few artists who approach this difficult issue. This list is neither comprehensive nor representative of trauma informed art. Instead, it provides users with some contemporary artists whose work addresses trauma and its implications.

Content Warning: Due to the subject matter, these articles and resources may include unsettling images and descriptions. In the event that you would like to know what each article or resource concerns in advance, please consult the CTL for further clarification.

8 Famous Artists Who Turned Heartbreak into Art
The resulting pieces run the gamut from impassioned and cathartic to deeply mournful. Arsty explores artists from Edvard Munch to Frida Kahlo to Felix Gonzalez-Torres have responded to the agony and upheaval that follows losing a lover.
Depictions of Trauma: Nick Cave's Tondo and Forothermore
The constant, looming threat of gun violence is a theme that Cave captures in his art. As a long-time resident of Chicago, which has one of the nation’s highest murder rates, Cave draws inspiration from neuroimaging scans of Black youth affected by gun violence to create his mesmerizing Tondo works.
Hayv Kahraman’s Provocative New Paintings Express Trauma and Healing
Hayv Kahraman’s oil-on-linen paintings depict women in both peaceful repose and in unsettling contortions. Embracing material exploration, the Iraqi-born artist has sliced into her canvases, incorporated acoustic foam amid the linen, painted on wood, made sculpture, sketched, and choreographed performance. Kahraman draws on disparate influences including Renaissance painting, Persian miniature painting, Art Nouveau, and her own experience as a woman in the Iraqi diaspora. Kahraman studied at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and Umeå University in Sweden.
William Kentridge: Pain and Sympathy
With his video History of the Main Complaint (1996) serving as a backdrop, William Kentridge discusses how artists draw upon tragedy as subject matter for their work and how drawing itself can be a compassionate act.
Lena Chen
Lena Chen (b. 1987, San Francisco) is a Chinese American artist creating performances and socially engaged art in live and virtual contexts. Creating feminist networks of care and platforms for self-representation, Chen produces socially engaged projects with communities such as mothers, trauma survivors, sex workers, and abortion providers.