Migraine Art is the framework Derek Robinson developed in the 1970s for collecting and exhibiting how migraine sufferers depict their own symptoms. The concept’s simplicity proved revolutionary: pictorial representation, in the hands of sufferers themselves, can communicate the experience of migraine more effectively than clinical description. The pages below trace the concept’s origins, the national competitions it inspired, the exhibitions and publications that followed, and the long historical lineage of migraine aura imagery that preceded it.
Derek Robinson and the Migraine Art Concept
In the 1970s, marketing executive Derek Robinson developed Migraine Art to articulate the unique power of visual representation in expressing migraine. The concept traces to 1973, when he encountered Miss J.R.B., a 42-year-old art teacher who had been illustrating her aura through sketches and paintings — Robinson saw in her work both the answer to a campaign brief and the seed of a much larger idea.
The Migraine Art Competitions
Between 1980 and 1987, four national Migraine Art Competitions in the UK drew roughly 900 submissions from sufferers across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. The 562 retained works became the founding archive of the field, sponsored jointly by the British Migraine Association (now Migraine Action Association) and Boehringer Ingelheim.
Migraine Art Exhibitions
From the 1981 opening at the City of London Migraine Clinic to “Mosaic Vision” at the San Francisco Exploratorium and shows across three continents, Migraine Art has been publicly exhibited since the early 1980s. Oliver Sacks’ visit to the 1991 San Francisco exhibition shaped his subsequent thinking and writing on the subject.
Publications on Migraine Art
Migraine art has reached medical and popular audiences through slide folders, films, peer-reviewed journals and books — including the thirteen collection images Oliver Sacks added to his 1992 revised edition of Migraine and Podoll & Robinson’s 2009 monograph Migraine Art — The Migraine Experience From Within.
Early Pictorial Representations of Visual Migraine Aura
Migraine sufferers depicted their symptoms long before Robinson coined the term. From Hildegard of Bingen’s 12th-century illuminations to Christian Ruete’s first medical illustration in 1845 and the 19th-century neurologists who followed (Charcot, Babinski, Gowers), there is a continuous lineage of migraine-aura imagery stretching back nearly nine hundred years.