About the Artist/Author

May H. Lesser, the daughter, sister, wife and mother of physicians, is a graduate of the H. Sophie Newcomb College, Tulane University, with honors in drawing. She studied anthropology at Columbia University and child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University. She received a master's degree in painting from the University of Alabama and did further graduate work at UCLA. She was granted the Tiffany Graphics Art Award and taught printmaking at the UC, Irvine.

She, as an artist, has had the rare experience of being "on-the-inside" of the medical centers of UCLA, the University of Southern California and Tulane University. Her work has been exhibited at UCLA, and UC, Irvine, Tulane University and Louisiana State University, the University of Miami, the University of Southern California, Case Western Reserve University, the Seattle Museum of Art, California State College at Long Beach, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Pittsburgh, the National Academy of Design, the George Washington University, the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Library of Medicine.

Her etchings and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Weatherspoon Gallery, the University of North Carolina, the Oklahoma Art Center, the ARS Medica Graphic Art Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Grunwald Graphic Art Foundation at UCLA, the Darling BioMed Library of UCLA, the Calder Medical Library of the University of Southern California, the New Orleans Museum Art and the National Library of Medicine. She published two books, The Art of Learning Medicine (Appleton-Century-Crofts, N.Y., 1974) and An Artist in the University Medical Center, (Tulane University Press, N.O., 1989), which won the Best Art Book of 1990, Mary Ellen Lopresti Publication Award of the Southeastern Art Librarians Association. Her color etchings and drawings have appeared on eleven covers of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

[A supplementary collection of work by the artist which did not appear in the original NLM exhibit is also available via this online exhibition]

Last Reviewed: May 11, 2012