Looking through a glass organ

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In the photo they look like odd-shaped bottles, perhaps hanging in an old-fashioned farmhouse kitchen. In real life, the green glass objects are small—no more than four inches long—resembling peppers more than containers. And there are 200 of them, suspended from plastic netting atop a metal frame.

They're gallbladders, as imagined and crafted by a physician and a glassblower. Beautiful, not bilious, "Gallbladders #200" is part of a new exhibit at the Yale School of Art's Green Gallery.

For the exhibit, "Looking In," doctors and glass artists teamed up to create representations of human organs: an aorta, wombs, gallbladders, omentum. That last one, for the nonmedical among us, is abdominal fat—bumpy and yellow-orange—which, in the exhibit, is "spilling over a common kitchen table as a statement about the contemporary diet." ("Draped Omentum" is the second image above.)

Put together by Reintegrate: Enhancing Collaborations in the Arts and Sciences, the exhibit opened yesterday and runs through June 28, with an "Ideas Talk" (part of New Haven's Arts & Ideas Festival) and opening reception on June 19. The closing reception, on June 27, will include a talk by David Yuh, professor and chief of cardiac surgery at the Yale School of Medicine, who is part of the doctor/artist team. Other team members are Lucinda Liu ’14MD; G. Kenneth Haines, associate professor and director of general surgical pathology; glass artists Michael Skrtic and Daryl Smith, who is also a scientific glassblower in the Yale chemistry department; and curator Sinclaire Marber ’15.

More photos, by New Haven photographer Chris Randall, are on Facebook. If mere images aren't enough for you, stop by the closing reception: an exhibit poster promises that they'll be giving away gallbladders, which "physicians have traditionally been quick to remove."