The staff of Miscellany are please to announce that the winner of the 2016 Lit-2-Vis contest is Ben Merritt, with his piece “A Case of Congenital Deformity,” inspired by the book “The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity” by Ashley Montagu.
Ben Merritt is a multimedia fine artist working in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Greenville, South Carolina. The work he produces engages in medicine and empathy, exploring what it means to emphasize with the subject in a work of art, and currently the representation of chronic illness in visual form. Using printmaking as a primary medium to work in, Ben is responding to the democratic traditions of print used by artists such as Edvard Munch, Goya, and Käthe Kollwitz in the ways he represents marginalized figures in the medical world.