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Helix Gallery

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Megan Voeller
Director of Humanities
Helix Gallery

1001 Locust Street
Hamilton Building
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Contact

Jefferson Humanities & Health

1020 Locust Street
Jefferson Alumni Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Helix Gallery

Aimee Koran: Relics of Care

August 10-December 11, 2026

Philadelphia artist Aimee Koran works across mediums and explores how images, issues, and objects intimately associated with motherhood reveal how care is valued in social, political and economic terms. By manipulating color, material and scale, she transforms personal possessions synonymous with pregnancy, infancy, and parenting - some hand-made, some handed down, some mass produced - from refuse into relics. Through her prints and sculptures, Koran retools the remnants of maternal labor to question ways in which the work of women is often overlooked and under-appreciated.

Koran’s solo exhibition at Helix Gallery features works that reflect multiple ongoing series by the artist. From her series "Tested," Koran's floor-to-ceiling wallpaper is composed of thousands of pregnancy test strips to suggest a weaving or embroidery in red, white and blue. Two series, "Chromed" and "Insiders," examine the objects of children's play. Stereotypically gendered plastic toys, such as dollhouses and dump trucks, are chrome-plated and evoke the parental tradition of bronzing baby shoes to preserve memories of a child’s early years. With "Insiders," Koran deconstructs her children’s once-beloved companions, abandoned in place of newer toys. By inverting the structure of the stuffed animals, she adds vulnerability and singularity to familiar mass-produced objects.

Koran's "Milkscapes" prints blur the boundaries between personal and social space, expanding a photograph of spilled breast milk into a sublime landscape. Inspired by an accidental spill after laborious pumping, the series explores how the female body is repeatedly called upon to perform and produce. Visitors are invited to take away an invisible labor tote celebrating Mothers in the Labor Force (MILF), designed by Koran to highlight caregiving and creative labor as collective work.

About Helix Gallery

Helix Gallery is a storefront exhibition space for artistic research exploring connections between the arts, humanities, medicine and health. The gallery showcases creative projects that highlight stories of embodiment and lived experience—often drawing from artists' own perspectives—with a focus on health equity and how historical and ongoing social factors shape health outcomes and experiences of care. Helix serves as a teaching and learning space for the university community, particularly those in health professions training.

Hours

Monday-Wednesday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. or by appointment. 

Location
1001 Locust Street, Philadelphia, 19107
Helix Gallery is located inside the Dorrance H. Hamilton Building on the ground floor. Enter through the building main entrance. Visitors without a Jefferson ID badge will need to check-in with the security guard on duty.

Accessibility

The main entrance to the Dorrance H. Hamilton building is fully accessible. The building’s lobby features a security desk to the right, and a bank of elevators to the left. 

The Helix Gallery is located on the left side of the lobby, around the corner from the elevators. The Helix Gallery is 300 square feet and features an accessible ramp.

Accessible restrooms are on the right-hand side of the hallway at the back of the lobby on the Locust Street side. Restrooms are accessible to Jefferson ID holders only and so visitors without a Jefferson ID must ask the security guard on duty for access. Visitors are welcome to use the restroom that most closely aligns with their gender identity or expression.

Questions? Contact: Kirsten Bowen, Humanities Program Coordinator

Past Projects

February 9-May 1, 2026

Artists Linda Ruggiero and Sugandha Gupta use textile practice to create works that honor embodied knowledge and challenge conventional modes of perception. Ruggiero draws from her experience as a critical care nurse, using the rhythm of weaving to process the emotional weight of trauma and caregiving. Her sculptural fiber works translate psychological states through color—warm tones expressing joy and connection, cool hues conveying isolation and grief—while the material itself embodies tension, containment, and release through texture and structural manipulation.

Gupta’s artistic vocabulary is rooted in touch, sound, and sensation. Her multi-sensory textiles deliberately resist the visual primacy of contemporary culture, inviting audiences to experience art through their strongest perceptual abilities. Drawing on phenomenological theory and research into sensory perception, she constructs elaborate textures and forms that engage multiple senses simultaneously, creating inclusive experiences that bridge disabled and non-disabled communities.

Both artists use fiber’s tactile properties to express what words cannot fully capture, from emotional trauma to sensory experience. Ruggiero’s weaving becomes therapeutic processing, while Gupta’s fabric manipulation activates intentional sensory engagement. Most significantly, both challenge viewers to move beyond passive visual observation, inviting physical and emotional interaction with their work. Where Ruggiero makes visible the invisible labor of caregiving, Gupta makes accessible the often-overlooked richness of non-visual perception. Together, their textiles create spaces of multi-faceted embodied understanding.

Braille and large print exhibition guide available at gallery entrance. 

Sugandha Gupta is Assistant Professor of Fashion Design and Materiality at Parsons 
School of Design. Born with Albinism and visually impaired, Gupta creates Sensory-Textiles, a collection of textiles and wearables that engage audiences through their sense of touch, sound, smell, and sight. Gupta’s research interests are at intersections of multi-sensory art, design and embodied justice. Over nearly twenty years, Gupta’s work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the United Nations Headquarters, American Craft Council, and the Smithsonian Craft Show, among others. She has won the Dorthy Waxman Textile Prize, International Design Award, and CFDA Design Graduate.

Linda Ruggiero is a Philadelphia-based nurse and textile artist whose sculptural fiber work is informed by her experiences in critical care at a Level I trauma center. As a clinically practicing nurse with doctoral training in neuroscience, she uses color psychology and tactile materiality to create textiles that tell stories of grief, trauma, and healing. Linda is largely self-taught but continues to receive guidance and training through local guilds and craft schools. Over the past year, she has exhibited work in juried group exhibitions at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Peters Valley School of Craft, and The Craft Coven Gallery. In June 2025, she presented her first solo exhibition, Woven Stories, at Da Vinci Art Alliance in Philadelphia.

January 12-16, 2026

Diagnosis is the fundamental first step of medical care. By naming a patient’s illness, the physician forecasts a patient’s future and begins the work of healing. It can be a poignant, circuitous journey for physicians and patients alike. This body of work seeks to explore the question: What does the physician experience during the diagnostic process?

Each artwork is inspired by an interview with a physician recounting a diagnosis that was meaningful to them. They describe anxiety from inconclusive results, professional satisfaction from solving a complex problem, heartbreak from delivering bad news, grief from realizing that someone they love is ill, and much more. Though the seed of each piece grows from individual physicians’ experiences, this exhibit invites audience members to reflect on the emotional facets of their own healthcare experiences; relationships to their patients, their vocation, and themselves.

Many of the works exhibited are interactive art. This medium requires the input of the audience to generate the final art piece. Leaving behind notes, solving puzzles, or performing physical exams are just a few examples of interactivity. Audience members are encouraged to follow the instructions listed on art pieces, touch the sculptures, and become fully immersed in the work. 

Maia Cole is a multidisciplinary artist and medical student at Sidney Kimmel Medical College. She graduated with a BA in International Literary and Visual Studies from Tufts University. Her work is inspired by the science and art of medicine. She hopes to illuminate the tumultuous emotional side of medical practice. This artwork began as a health humanities project created by Maia Cole through the Scholarly Inquiry program at Sidney Kimmel Medical College. 

Kara Mshinda, "Untitled". Digital Collage Print (2025)

September 15 - December 10, 2025

Of Black Wombhood (OBW) is an independently produced oral history project created by curator and cultural producer Tanya Latortue. Featuring auditory and visual renderings of personal narratives by sound artist JL Simonson and visual artist Kara Mshinda, OBW explores the interiority of Black womb-bearing people through stories about culture, health, sexuality, identity, and the politicization of the Black body from the past to the present.

OBW’s inquiry into wombhood beyond the periphery of pregnancy and birthing invites us to acknowledge the stories of Black womb-bearers with cultural sensitivity and social responsiveness, and to contemplate:

  • What role does the womb play in defining one’s personal identity within the Black body?
  • What does Black wombhood represent in the modern era?  
  • How can we reconcile the history of an ancestor—whose womb/body was misappropriated—within the memory of a physical space? 

From March through June 2025, OBW debuted as a multimedia art exhibition across two Philadelphia-based art galleries—TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image and Da Vinci Art Alliance—and now continues its journey at Thomas Jefferson University’s Helix Gallery. Original work from each of the previous exhibitions is highlighted in this iteration, which features stories with health-centered perspectives.

Visual artist Kara Mshinda rendered each story into a portrait of its narrator through her fusion of photography and collage. Sound artist JL Simonson blended interview excerpts with ambient sound and audible frequency to adapt the narratives into an experimental soundscape. 

Curator Tanya Latortue (she/her) is an operations professional and emerging independent cultural producer whose practice investigates how various socio-political infrastructures can impact core physiology and humanistic psychology within the Black body. She holds a Master of Public Health in Sociomedical Science from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Penn State University. She is the project’s creator and lead producer.

Artist Kara Mshinda (she/her) is a visual anthropologist who creates photo-based artworks about identity, memory, and embodiment in community contexts. Mshinda is an alumna of Temple University (‘07) and is best known for using collage, abstract drawing, collaborative portraiture, and alternative photo processes to document urban landscapes, candid play, social encounters, and the material culture of daily life. Her recent projects include Meta, a collection of abstract ink drawings on photos, canvas, and paper and All Hands Hold, an instant film photography project and visual study about identity expression and hand performance. Mshinda is the Fellowship Director at Da Vinci Art Alliance and is a Principal Collaborator of GrioXArts, a studio-centered art space at Cherry Street Pier that focuses on building community via process-based art education.

Artist JL Simonson (they/them) is an artist who explores transgressive temporalities, acoustic archaeology, and listening in the diaspora. They combine interoceptive recordings, archival media, extrasensory frequencies, and interactive electronics in addition to piano and guitar to create multimedia installations and electroacoustic soundscapes. Drawing from practices in oral history and historiographical cartography, Simonson has collaborated with listeners on streets and sidewalks around the world. Their work has been generously supported by Art Basel Miami, On Air Fest, Roulette Intermedium, the Estate of Pauline Oliveros, the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, and the Great Lakes Association of Sound Studies among others.

July 28-August 20, 2025

Since 1985, Old St. Joseph’s Church in Philadelphia has sponsored Faith, Food, and Friends (FF&F), an all-volunteer program offering lunch and support three days a week to people facing homelessness and food insecurity. Guests of the program were invited to create an original exhibition on a theme of their choosing. Their theme—nature, the home we all share—is a reminder of both our common home and our shared humanity. Participating artists: Jahiem Fields, Hector Matias, Kevin Sanders, Kassidy Skye, John Snyder, They Them, LaVonne Wells, Kevin Wiehsner, Bill Stigliani. Curated by Lisa Hannum, artist and volunteer at FF&F, and Andrew Huff, PhD student, Jefferson College of Population Health, and volunteer at FF&F

Anish Basavalingiah, Petals, digital photograph

May 19 - June 18, 2025

Traveling Light brings together the unique perspectives of three Jefferson medical students  - Anish Basavalingiah, Ajay Garg & Emma Tam - who are also passionate artists. The show features an array of travel photographs from wide-ranging locations, as well as charcoal drawing and fashion design. All the artists are contributors to the literary and arts journal Inside Out, making this exhibition a celebration of their multifaceted talents. Inside Out is Jefferson’s annual student-led art and literary journal that showcases photography, paintings, drawings, short stories, poems and essays by Jefferson students. All Jefferson students are welcome to submit their work to Inside Out’s annual call for submissions during November-January each academic year.

Dominic Quagliozzi, Co-Parenting, 2024, therapeutic thoracic pillow, teddy bear, medicine packaging, polycotton fill, thread, 17 inches x 15 inches

February 3-April 4, 2025

In this solo exhibition by Dominic Quagliozzi, the artist presents recent work that is informed by his lived experience with Cystic Fibrosis and as a recipient of a double lung transplant in 2015. Since that time, he has loosely documented the changes in his body through paintings, sculptures, works on paper and video. His art also functions as talismans through which to channel change that is self-empowering, and indeed, more able to be controlled, flipping the inevitable estrangement he experienced within the medical industrial complex as a patient of a serious and life-threatening surgery. This exhibition takes on this journey through work completed between 2019-2024. Included in the exhibition are three reconstituted hospital gowns made from various materials (using hospital gown material as a starting point): Suit (2019), Parachute (2022) and Teddy Bear Clinic (2024), a pink therapeutic thoracic pillow fashioned into a lung swaddled by a diced teddy bear, entitled Co-parenting (2024), Help Me Up (2020), a looping video installation of limbs against sky, which are simultaneously falling and reaching, and Anatomy Drawings 1 & 2 (2024), a mimicry of the hands and arms in the companion video. The drawings have been beautifully crafted from betadine, an antiseptic that provides infection protection commonly used before surgery, along with colored pencils, acrylic gel, and thread on cut paper which has been sewed together by a zig-zag pattern, alluding to surgical stitching. The title of the exhibition is taken from one of the first modern anatomy books by Andreas Vesalius entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Of the Structure of the Human Body) (1555). The themes of the Vesalius text have inspired Quagliozzi’s work, through the history of studying the human body, and current trends within the medical humanities to extend those histories from a strictly medical world into a dialogue on the social, cultural and political circumstances surrounding health and wellness. By emphasizing the human in medical humanities, Quagliozzi’s objects and their accompanying narratives contribute to this evolving critical field in ways that are playful, introspective and reflective of the fragility and vulnerability of chronic illness.

Dominic Quagliozzi (artist) is a multidisciplinary artist and arts educator. His work reconciles his lived experience with chronic illness and disability to explore personal histories and the domestication of illness. He received an MFA in Studio Arts from Cal State University, Los Angeles and a BA in Sociology from Providence College. His work is in the permanent collection at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum and in the Rhizome.org digital archive. In 2018, he was on the Keynote patient panel at the Nexus Summit for Interprofessional Care and Education at the University of Minnesota. He was a recipient of the MassMOCA Assests4Artists statewide capacity grant in 2024. He is on the Arts Council for Creative Healing for Youth in Pain. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Calgary Contemporary in Canada and Casula Powerhouse Art Centre in New South Wales, Australia. He has given workshops and lectures at the Rhode Island School of Design, Worcester Art Museum, UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, USC Keck School of Medicine, Chapman University and Cal State Long Beach.

Amanda Cachia (curator) has an established career profile as a curator, consultant, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality. She is the tenure-track Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of the Arts Leadership Graduate Program at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston. She is a 2023 grantee of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her second monograph, Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism, which is forthcoming with Manchester University Press in September 2025. Her first book, The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique, will be released in December 2024 by Temple University Press. Cachia is also the editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022) published by Routledge, which includes over 40 international contributors. Her writing has been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian. She has a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego. Cachia has curated approximately 50 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the USA, England, Australia and Canada. 

Coralina Rodriguez Meyer pictured with a sculpture from her Mother Mold monuments series (2018-present)

November 15-December 13, 2024

This solo installation features Brooklyn-based Quipucamayoc artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer. Known for her work blending indigenous American, Caribbean and African diasporic doula, griot, quipucamayoc and botanica rituals, Rodriguez Meyer draws on critically endangered embodied wisdom to mend medical wounds across bonded ancestries, geographies, bondaged diasporas, genders and generations. 

For her site-specific installation, Rodriguez Meyer has transformed the gallery's institutional white walls into a fabric-cradled, fertile dwelling, integrating reproductive and climate justice healing strategies through documentary sculpture, photography and painting. The installation features two of Rodriguez Meyer’s Mother Mold monuments, pregnancy casts made with workshop participants in the artist’s prior Mama Spa Botanica workshops (2018-present). To create the sculptures, Rodriguez Meyer cast the torsos of pregnant participants using a combination of silicone, plaster and discarded materials including latex gloves, birth control pill and abortion pill packaging, human hair, fingernail clippings, nail salon glitter, serapes, hair or fruit nets, and environmental ephemera such as palm fronds, funerary flowers, and coral collected after tropical storms. Conceived as fertility effigies, the resulting sculptures honor frontline survivors of the dual reproductive health and climate crisis in the U.S.

About the Artist 

Born in a car in an Everglades swamp, raised Tinkuy and Ital between Homestead, Florida, and the Caribbean, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a mixed-race indigenous Andean American (Muisca/Inca), Brooklyn and Miami-based Quipucamayoc artist, archive digger, architect and advocate. Spanning 20 years and 30 countries, Coralina has collaborated with reproductive justice and climate leaders while working in installation, photography, sculpture, architecture and academia. Coralina founded Abra Studio in 2005, is a professor at Pratt, a visiting lecturer at University of Maryland and resident of Ankhlave Arts Alliance NYC. They studied painting at MICA and anthropology at Hopkins and hold a BFA in Architecture from Parsons and MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College. 

Adam & Rosi, 2023, photograph by Carly Onofrio-Kane

July 22 – September 13, 2024

Service dogs can provide a lifeline back to the world for veterans experiencing PTSD, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and other mental health struggles. Developed from a Scholarly Inquiry Humanities project at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, medical student Carly Onofrio-Kane interviewed and took photo portraits of nine veterans with their service dogs in analog and digital film, discussing their relationship in the context of healing. The narratives express the life-saving impact of service dogs on veterans’ lives, demonstrating an opportunity to explore their companionship as a supplement to traditional medical care. Given the high rates of PTSD and suicide in veterans, the project encourages a sense of urgency in increasing access to service dogs for veterans. 

Carly Onofrio-Kane is a third-year medical student at SKMC. As a former hairstylist, she loved hearing the stories of her clients, and is grateful to hear new stories in the patients she meets at Jefferson. She graduated from Temple University with a BA in Psychology in 2020. She started practicing amateur photography in her early teens and enjoys experimenting with various analog films. She is a recipient of the VA Health Professional Scholarship Program and will continue in her story collection and advocacy for service dogs and veteran healthcare.

Phoebe Warren (Curator) is a third-year medical student at SKMC. Before beginning her medical education, Phoebe received a BA in Art History from Princeton University in 2021. Her Senior Thesis research addressed the ways in which images shape our understanding of disease pandemics. She served as an Education Fellow for the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 2022. 

May 1-July 1, 2024

The annual Jefferson student art exhibition celebrates the unique talents of Jefferson students across health professions. This year’s showcase at Helix Gallery highlights visual artist contributors to Inside Out, Jefferson’s student-led literary and art journal, as well as the three commissioned student artists for the 2023-2024 Jefferson Humanities Forum theme, "Futures."

Featuring: Connor Crutchfield, Amanda Rose Farese, Benjamin Fleet, Meryem Guler, Faith Higgins, Sarah Muche-Smith, Abhijeet Sambangi, Elizabeth Upton and Madison Woods.

January 17 - April 13, 2024

Jefferson Humanities & Health and The Institute on Disabilities, Temple University, College of Education and Human Development, present File/Life: We Remember Stories of Pennhurst at Helix Gallery.

Over nearly eight decades, more than 10,000 people lived at the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, an institution for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities operated by the state of Pennsylvania from 1908 to 1987. When it opened, Pennhurst was considered a model facility. When it closed, it was because Pennhurst violated the human rights of the people living there.

File/Life is a community-led creative exploration of the Pennhurst archives by seven archivists, all people with disabilities and/or family members, including two former Pennhurst residents. These community archivists collaborated with a team of multi-disciplinary artists to share stories that made them listen, feel, imagine, and remember. In doing so, they asked the question: Can a file ever contain a life?

Visitors are invited to read and interact with archival material, listen to audio and watch video. Content is ASL interpreted, audio described, captioned, and available in Braille and though QR codes. Some video content is accessed through headphones.

Learn more about File/Life

October 9, 2023 - January 5, 2024

Pulling from the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Rami George presents “The Crisis Isn’t Over,” a new exhibition for Jefferson’s Helix Gallery. With a focus on materials related to the ongoing AIDS crisis, George revisits legacies of activism from ACT UP and local figures lost early to AIDS. “The Crisis Isn’t Over” continues George’s explorations into local Philadelphia queer history, and is their first presentation as the Archives inaugural Artist in Residence.

Rami George (born 1989, U.S.) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based on Lenape land in what is now called Philadelphia. Their work—spanning photo, video, installation, text, and music/sound—has been presented in exhibitions and screenings at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Anthology Film Archives, New York City; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Scotland; Grand Union, Birmingham, England; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; LUX, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and elsewhere. They continue to be influenced and motivated by political struggles and fractured narratives.

Image from "Au Courant" Photographs Collection in the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center, selected and scanned by Rami George.

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