Current Exhibitions: Fall 2025

Exhibitions' Opening Reception!

October 14th, 4pm-6pm, 2nd floor, Ebling Library

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The Weight of Air: Paintings by Ryan McAdams

"Modeling for Motherhood": Visions of Maternity from the Ebling Library Collections

August 11, 2025 - December 4, 2025

September 8, 2025 - January 5, 2025

Dr. Ryan McAdams creates art that bridges two worlds of healing—the hospital and the artist's studio. As a practicing neonatologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, McAdams has dedicated his career to saving the tiniest lives while using his brush to illuminate profound inequities that threaten them. His unique perspective is deeply shaped by humanitarian missions across four continents, from a generator-lit bush hospital in Uganda to remote outposts in Mongolia, which revealed stark disparities in global healthcare.

These powerful experiences inspire McAdams' compelling visual narratives, where his paintings serve to document global health challenges and confront uncomfortable truths about who receives care and who doesn't. His artwork has been featured on the covers of publications such as Academic Medicine, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and the Wisconsin Medical Journal, transforming clinical conversations into broader dialogues about justice and humanity. Through his art, McAdams builds a vital bridge between the technical world of neonatal intensive care and the human stories that drive his unwavering mission for universal healthcare equity.

“Modeling for Motherhood” brings together five centuries of publishing on pregnancy and birth to highlight the role of textual objects in the development of modern obstetrics. Through medical illustrations, birthing guides, and pedagogical works, the exhibition traces the Western medical canon’s parallel functions up to the 1950s, both as a tool to legitimize male intervention in birthing spaces and as a force in defining cultural expectations around pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum experience. These normalizing forces are juxtaposed with radical and feminist birth texts of the midwifery movement, used to challenge obstetrical hegemonies in the second half of the twentieth century. By understanding these legacies of both conventional and countercultural obstetrical works, we can interrogate our own assumptions about what modern maternity is or should be.

"Modeling for Motherhood" is currently on view in Ebling Library's Historical Reading Room, located on the south side of the library's third floor. Open hours vary; we recommend contacting the Historical Services team to check before visiting.