This year, we decided to approach the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in a completely new way: through illustrations.
Our illustrator Katie Goldberg offered to go out into the crowded hallways and capture the images of ASCO 2019.
I have never thought of ASCO as fodder for art. When 40,000 people who share interests convene in one spot, they create a culture. When they meet for just a few days, they create an ephemeral culture.
Abstracts, photos, and videos capture that culture, but an artist can see something else: the energy of interactions, scenes you might simply rush past.
Katie and I agreed on the parameters of the assignment. Her goal wasn’t to capture images of important people as they delivered lectures or rushed by. Instead, she was to roam the halls, capturing something only an artist can see—the spirit of the gathering, its visual language, its motion.
We’ve interspersed her art throughout the pages of the our PDF issue, which you can download here, or scroll down to see the full gallery.
