Abraham Schroeder (MFA '05) keeps about 20 pairs of scissors around his house, including a pair right next to his bed. "I like to be able to wake up and start working," he says. "I never know when I'll need to cut something out at a moment's notice."

During the day, Schroeder works at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, cataloging and processing a collection of 50,000 Japanese woodblock prints. In his off-hours, he catalogues the human body, working primarily in digital and cut-paper collage. Schroeder approaches the body almost like a scientist: he separates the parts of the whole and then puts them back together in surreal, unexpected ways. Shoulders attach to thighs. Fingers sprout from both ends of a palm. One of his series of images is titled "Surgeries."

Schroeder's mother went to medical school and studied acupuncture when he was a child, and by the age of 4, he says, he was thumbing through the Color Atlas of Human Anatomy and other medical textbooks. "I was also really accident-prone, so we were in and out of the emergency room, and I had a lot of stitches," he says. "I got interested in the idea that our bodies are resilient and can be sewn back together."

Meanwhile, Schroeder began studying Japanese at his Homer, Alaska, high school. At Amherst College, he plunged into a mixture of Japanese, studio art, and art history, and eventually ended up at the Museum School, where he experimented with welding, sculpture, and sound as well as printmaking and digital art.
Then came a research assistant position at the MFA and the collection of Japanese woodblock prints, one of the largest of its kind in the world. "My job is basically to to dust them off, wake them up, and share them with the world," Schroeder says. The prints, dating back mostly to the 18th and 19th centuries, were the mass media of their time, chronicling celebrities and popular culture just as television and the Internet do today.

Schroeder's most recent large project stems from his immersion in these prints. When the Japanese baseball player Daisuke Matsuzaka arrived in Boston in 2007 to join the Red Sox, "something clicked," Schroeder says. He created a colorful digital image of Matsuzaka throwing a baseball in the style of a woodblock print, "a 21st-century reworking of a 19th-century concept," he says. The work was included in an MFA exhibit last year that celebrated the Red Sox and the history of baseball in both the United States and Japan.

Is this a departure from his body collages? Not entirely, Schroeder says. "I approached this piece the same way I approach my other projects. I'm looking at gestures, re-contextualizing ideas, showing how body parts can be like calligraphic strokes." But yes, he says. "It looks completely different."