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Art and Healing

 

Healthcare facilities have become some of my favorite partners in recent years. I’m a strong believer in the benefits of good art on health, so it’s very edifying to create work for environments wholly dedicated to healing. I was happy to see a recent feature in Public Art Review looking at art and healing through different examples of public art in hospitals.

As the article points out, hospitals commissioning art is nothing new; but numerous initiatives in the past couple years indicate a new level of serious attention and meaningful integration of contemporary art in healthcare environments, with particular attention to the public areas of those environments. That’s an intriguing and significant shift. The architectural glass “skin” by Spencer Finch that I featured on this blog a few years ago is highlighted alongside several other projects from John Hopkins Hospital, a facility whose art program is a model for this movement, commissioning more than 70 artists to create over 500 original works. The article also brings up “percent-for-art” programs, like the one I happily encountered in Rockville, as another kind of model in which city or state ordinances require certain percentages of construction budgets to be used for public art.

 

 

When I first started work on “Water Walk” for Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, I wrote about Spaulding’s intentionality around making many of its facilities and resources available to the general public. This kind of effort not only encourages visitors, making patients less isolated, but helps people re-enter their communities more easily as they heal. I’m inspired to see more hospitals taking this approach and understanding the important role that art can play–both in the direct healing process and in the creation of welcoming public spaces.

Click here for more examples of works I’ve created for healthcare environments.