When Ryan McAdams was young, an aunt gave him a set of oil paints as a gift. He was transfixed and started on a path toward becoming an artist. However, medicine intervened, and Ryan McAdams, MD, professor in the Division of Neonatology and Newborn Nursery and member of the Division of Global Pediatrics, served many years as a neonatologist in the United States Air Force. His service included three years in Japan, and his interest expanded to humanitarian work in Peru, Mongolia, Cambodia, Zambia, Malawi, and Uganda. Instead of choosing one path — medicine over art — McAdams combined and intertwined them, realizing that his artistic vision and his medical work nurtured and strengthened each other.
“My paintings express my experiences and strong feelings about inequities and injustice in health care for babies, children, and their parents in the United States and worldwide,” he said. “I hope it communicates that to those who see them.”
Over the last decade, McAdams’s paintings have appeared on numerous medical journal covers. This fall, an exhibit of nine of McAdams’ paintings graces the walls of two floors in the Ebling Library for Health Sciences. The exhibit, The Weight of Air, is open through December 4, with a public reception on October 14, from 4 to 6 p.m.
McAdams offered a statement about his vision conveyed in the selection of his displayed works.
The Weight of Air gathers nine of my paintings, each drawn from the charged silence where medicine and art converge — a silence that remains unspoken until given form. Through brush and pigment, I try to make space for memory, grief, advocacy, or a child’s brief but enduring presence to live on.
These works arise from the lives of babies and children I have cared for — here in Wisconsin and in far corners of the world where resources are scarce and inequities stark. Each piece stands on its own, yet all are bound by a thread of vulnerability and resilience. The Orphans traces the solitude of children left behind. Beauty of Breastfeeding honors the precious intimacy of nourishment and bond. States of Inequity confronts the grim divide in who receives care and who does not. In Suffocating Skies, the girl’s mask could signal the COVID pandemic, yet the greater threat may be the smoke-filled air from burning fields in northern India. And in Lost Stars, the tragic loss of stillbirth lingers, grief pressed into the canvas as testimony.
Though each painting tells a story, together they form a single conversation—about survival, justice, and the fragile breath that binds us all. More than illustrations of medicine, they are meditations on endurance, belonging, fragility, and our shared humanity.