Motorcycles, high heels, and horses will be among the diverse subjects available for contemplation when the Brunnier Art Museum unveils three new exhibitions Tuesday.

The three exhibits “eMotion Pictures: An Exhibition of Orthopaedics in Art,” “John Bloom,” and “Christian Petersen” will be open to the public until early January.

Rachel Hampton, communication specialist with the Brunnier Museum, says eMotion Pictures are works in a variety of media created by professional artists, children and doctors. All the exhibitors have had an orthopaedic condition to deal with personally or have had patients with one.

The sixty-piece exhibit is sponsored by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and has been travelling for about two and a half years, says Debbie Gitchell, an associate of the curator of the university museums. Gitchell was instrumental in bringing the exhibit to Iowa and says she was inspired to do so after seeing it in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

At the original San Francisco exhibition in February 1999, Gitchell says she got a chance to meet some of the artists, who ranged in age.

“The children were just darling,” she says. “One of the more disabled boys just loves art now. He was all dressed up in a suit and said `It’s made my life so happy.'”

The healing power of art is one of the main themes running through all of the works in the exhibit, Hampton says. One of the more striking pieces is by a young man who was involved in a motorcycle crash and seriously injured his leg.

The moving sculpture is made of motorcycle parts reassembled after the artist-patient’s accident. The motor vrooms, the wheels turn, and the headlight projects videos of both a motorcyclist-eye’s-view of city streets and his knee surgery. The piece literally represents creation after destruction.

The pieces by the orthopaedic surgeons “show how much they care,” Gitchell says. One of the doctors’ pieces portrays a surgeon holding his head in his hands and is titled “I wish I could have done more.”

Two other pieces underline another purpose of the eMotion exhibition – to make people aware of their bone and joint health.

The first serves as a precaution against dangerous footware. It’s is an X-ray of a woman in a high-heeled shoe showing how the foot bones strangely curve to fit the high arch.

The other, by child artist Yosuf Zulal, is a picture full of colorful people. Across the bottom he carefully printed, “I wish for all the children of the world to be safe and have respect for their own lives.”

Gitchell says the exhibit also correlates with the “decade of bone and joint health” declared by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

The artists involved, and artists in general have similarities with surgeons, Gitchell says.

“A lot of surgeons are like custom carpenters when they put the bones back together,” she says.

The artist-surgeon connection can also be seen in the John Bloom exhibit.

Ivan Hanthorn, an associate professor with the library, was responsible for restoring and piecing together the paper cartoon studies for the John Blooms murals. He said the process was “like surgery.”

The studies were executed in black crayon and served as the blueprint for Blooms murals now located in Tipton and DeWitt.

The long, wide papers were found rolled up in Bloom’s attic after his death last May 2002, Hampton says.

Bloom was an artist who did most of his paintings and drawings during the New Deal era in the 1930s, Hampton said. He worked at the same time as Christian Petersen, the resident artist of Iowa State whose sculptures are displayed all over campus.

“The reason for this Bloom exhibition is because it is our mission to place Christian Petersen in terms of his contemporaries,” Hampton says. “We’ve been planning this a long time.”

One of the Brunnier curators had been working closely with Bloom, Hampton says, both interviewing him up until his death and tracing down his works. The Brunnier Art Museum has collected Bloom pieces from as far back as his ninth-grade year. She says Bloom gradually worked through his strengths and weaknesses as an artist.

People who come to see Bloom’s works can watch that development throughout the exhibit.

Hampton said one of Bloom’s strengths was that he was a “master draftsman.”

“I don’t think that’s been brought to light until now,” she says.

Though Bloom was a somewhat prolific artist, Hampton says, Iowa State’s is only the second Bloom exhibit ever to be shown, the first being in Davenport.

Twelve of Christian Petersen’s sculptures make up the display next to Bloom’s in order to show the similarities and differences between the two artists. Though some of the Museum’s 800 Petersen pieces have been shown before in the Brunnier, Hampton says the twelve sculptures displayed now are “what we feel are most significant that can be displayed.”

She says many of the other Petersen pieces the University Museums owns are two-dimensional preparatory studies for his sculptures.

“Bloom and Petersen both had a passion for depicting local scenes and the human condition, and a sensitivity to human form,” Hampton says.

That sensitivity is apparent in all three exhibits.

Hampton said many related lectures have been scheduled to accompany the current Brunnier exhibits.