Yesterday Iain and I started the day at a shopping mall surrounded by mall walkers and employees rolling in to start their day, and ended in a medical health sciences library among graduate and medical students studying or headed to the gym on a rainy Sunday. It was time to leave South Shore Plaza and install at Tufts University Health Science Campus in Boston’s Chinatown.

We were there at the invitation of Director of Student Wellness, Snaggs Gendron, who had first heard about I Am More during our first visit to Northshore Mall in 2020. She had saved a newspaper article about the exhibit to see if she would be able to bring it to her campus sometime in the future. Cue the pandemic.

After supporting her campus community through three years of Covid, she was visiting with her friend Ulla, who also happens to be our friend and neighbor, and somehow the subject of I Am More came up. Ulla pointed out that the artist was right across the street and had met Snaggs before. We were reintroduced and made a plan to bring I Am More to Tufts for Mental Health Awareness Month (May).

The Health Sciences Campus includes medicine, dental medicine, nutrition and biomedical sciences, so we included portraits with topics covering mental illnesses, but also diagnoses that can impact mental health, in order to address conditions students might be coping with themselves, but also to help them understand their future patients.

We’re very grateful to Snaggs for inviting us, and for the important services she and her staff provide at Tufts. We hear therapy dogs are coming soon…

I Am More is made possible by the generosity of individuals. To make a tax-deductible donation toward future portraits and exhibits go to fiscal sponsor Ocean Alliance’s donation page and choose “I Am More” from the list of programs. Thanks so much for your support!