From her designated Zoom rectangle, Wendy Kline is describing the séance she took part in to exorcise a deceased doctor from the world of gynecology. As I listen, the multimedia artist Nao Bustamante nods and smiles from her box in the chat, reminiscing. Kline, author and chair of the History of Medicine department at Purdue University, is referring to Bustamante’s 2022 performance at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Bustamante’s traveling exhibition, BLOOM, focuses on the history, function, and design of the speculum — the main medical tool that has been used since the mid 1800s to examine the vagina. The show has journeyed from San Antonio, Texas (2021) to New York City (2022) to Los Angeles (2024), where I encountered its presentation with an accompanying event featuring Kline. I was struck by the ways in which the work of the medical historian and the artist flowed together. I wanted to discuss how art can enliven — and perhaps correct — the historical record. During the show’s San Antonio run, Kline was in the beginning stages of researching and writing what would become her fourth book, Exposed: The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam. A friend and colleague of Kline’s alerted her to the remarkably similar subject matter of BLOOM and she caught the show in its final days. Much of Exposed‘s second chapter ended up addressing Bustamante’s art. Both parties claim to be “gobsmacked” by the other’s interest in working together. Bustamante was surprised that “a serious historian would take my musings more seriously,” and Kline, wowed by the artist’s talent, was stimulated by the “interdisciplinary conversation because so much good can come from generating ideas on new levels.” Installation view of Nao Bustamante: BLOOM at Track 16 Gallery, Los AngelesKline’s book is a riveting account of women’s health in the United States. She unearths a cultural lineage of horrific medical abuse, ping-ponging back and forth between recent headlines and events from past centuries. Her writing cadence has a frictionless glide, despite the clinical specificity of her subject matter. Kline credits this to her engagement with Bustamante’s work at the start of her writing process. She claims that the artwork “set the groundwork” for her own approach, which was rooted entirely in conveying the personhood missing from the medical records. The physicality and play in Bustamante’s work immediately transport viewers into her conceptual world. She doesn’t invite them to contemplate the speculum and the history of women’s health as much as she ensconces them so thoroughly that the only possible thought is what it might feel like to receive a metallic, cold, rigid, archaic, and often painful tool inserted into your most private anatomy. Bustamante’s display vitrines, films, installations, and performances create a distinct realm for the topic. Even the entrance to BLOOM — passing through a lush, velvet, deep burgundy drapery with regal passementerie — embodies a tactility that must be experienced.Cover of Wendy Kline’s Exposed: The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam (image courtesy Polity Books)In their own ways, the artist and historian are problem solvers and public educators. They grapple with issues of awareness and context. Both are in search of a more holistic understanding to shed light on subject matter that feels incomplete, veiled, or yet undiscovered. “If you want to breathe life into a past in which so much is hidden or has been destroyed, you have to be creative,” said Kline, gesturing toward Bustamante through the screen. “That enables a richer conversation between a historian who deals with the invisible and an artist who’s constantly visualizing things.” In this particular instance, what’s being visualized — viscerally — is the sovereignty of a person with a vagina in wanting to care for their own health. “It’s not just any kind of art we’re talking about,” Kline explained. “This is something that has been censored, silenced, stigmatized. There’s a political importance to putting a visual on it, providing a narrative.” The path to modern medicine is neither evenly nor beautifully paved. Both Kline and Bustamante explore the racist, sexist, would-be-very-illegal-today methods through which we’ve come to understand gynecology and its associated parts of the human body. They take particular care to give names to the three enslaved women — Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy — whose bodies were repeatedly pulled apart by the foremost doctor on gynecological study, though they are never named in his accounts. Artist Michelle Browder paid homage to the same women in a trio of sculptures entitled “The Mothers of Gynecology” (2021) that sit as an outdoor monument in Montgomery, Alabama, just blocks away from the office of the man who practiced on them. It serves as another example wherein a work of art has made important details of the past more accessible and immediate. Thanks to Browder, these women have faces. Even if they’re not their true visages, faces make them more real than names in an obscure book.When addressing history, art enables spectators to insert themselves into a moment in the past, and its freedom of interpretation allows people to embody diverse perspectives. What’s intriguing about the work of Bustamante and Kline is that it does not allow their spectators to stay where they are: Made even stronger when presented together, their creative production highlights the past in order to better shape the future. Kline hopes to improve the medical culture and sensitivity around women’s exams, while Bustamante speckles her art with the concept of the “vaginal imaginary” — a realm in which one can think about that body part outside of what we already know. In the vaginal imaginary, Bustamante uses performance art to mix historical fact, present frustration, and welcome possibilities for a broader understanding. We employ science fiction upon the same basis, to examine the possibilities of technology, physics, space, and civilization. “I feel that is kind of, in a way, the only way to live,” Bustamante noted, succinctly summing up the relationship between her art and history. “The past, present, and future all-at-onceness of it all. … It’s a way to sort of travel to protect [women] in the past — a kind of memorial work.” Installation view of Nao Bustamante: BLOOM at Track 16 Gallery, Los AngelesExposed: The Hidden History of the Pelvic Exam by Wendy Kline is published by Polity Books and available online and in bookstores.