CUNY Institute for Health Equity (CIHE)
Inaugural Speaker’s Series on:
Health Equity and Health Disparities

Nancy Breen, PhD, received her PhD in Economics from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1988. Her undergraduate degrees are in Political Science and French. Dr. Breen served as health economist at the National Institutes of Health: from 1991 to 2015 at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and from 2015 to 2019 at the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). She co-edited the NIMHD-sponsored AJPH Supplement (January 2019) “New Perspectives to Advance Minority Health and Health Disparities Research”. Dr. Breen’s more than 100 peer-reviewed articles reflect her desire to improve the evidence base for understanding the social determinants underlying health disparities. Her published work has increasingly focused on how structures and policies lead to health disparities. Her objective is to inspire broad-based interventions leading to social justice and economic sustainability.

We begin with two important examples of public health policy, then survey the concepts of Fundamental Causes and Social Determinants of Health (SDoH). After comparing how Fundamental Causes --structural racism and poverty—affect the health of racial/ethnic populations in the US, we will explore how some key SDoH --income, wealth, and housing stability—have evolved differentially for these same racial/ethnic populations over time. A deeper understanding of upstream determinants requires investigating economic inequality as a historical phenomenon. Today’s macroeconomy promotes financial inequality, consumer debt, and poor health in multiple ways. Finally, we return to public health policy by considering some interventions designed to address racial/ethnic and class inequalities in income, wealth and housing and end by probing how these policies might be refined using Community Based Participatory Research to become even more effective.

• Census Date
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Castles in the Sky: Fantasy Architecture in Contemporary Art. Now through January 26, 2019
In the Lehman College Art Gallery. 

The buildings in our mind’s eye are limitless.

In our dreams, we unlock doors to unknown passages and climb unending stairs into the darkness of rooms, strange and never seen before.  Not tied to the reality of bricks and mortar or ground and gravity, we imagine any structure ― the American “dream home” on a coveted suburban cul-de-sac beyond our reach, or the wild acid-trip floating balloon palace of a magical unicorn.

Jarring the laws of actual architecture, the imagined palace functions as very real foundation, buttress, and pillar for Castles in the Sky. From Claes Oldenburg’s proposal to replace the Washington Monument with a gigantic scissors to Laurie Simmons’ photograph of candy castles atop a cake weathering a blizzard of confectionary “snow,” the 30 artists in Castles in the Sky develop bizarre, impractical, enchanting, and inspiring unbuilt (and likely unbuildable) designs, and gather inspiration from famous sources.

Lother Osterberg draws from the etchings of 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the creator of images of dark and cavernous space― the nightmarish side of the architectural dream. Will Cotton’s candy castle represents a fantastical continuum of the art of 19th-century American landscape painter Thomas Cole, who, in Youth (1842), pictures a man rushing towards the mirage of a castle in the sky, the locus of all his youthful dreams. In Salvador Dali’s Gala’s Castle (1974) an elephant on attenuated legs tiptoes across a castle crenellation in Surrealist activity, which we spy, again, today, in Adrien Broom’s improbable scene of a Victorian woman standing in her drawing room open to the sky and filled with a wandering zebra.

This exhibition plays tribute to the ceaseless meanderings of the human imagination and the creative fantasy the hovers in the recesses of every artist’s mind.