Art as Care: Hospital Murals in Pediatric Healthcare

About the Panel Discussion

When Abram Champanier painted his Alice mural cycle for the children's ward at Gouverneur Hospital in 1938, he understood something that took the field of healthcare design decades to articulate: that the environment in which a child receives care is integral to that care, as much as any clinical intervention. This panel discussion asks what that conviction looks like in New York City's public hospitals today.

Since 2012, RxART has placed nine major commissions by internationally recognized artists throughout NYC Health + Hospitals, with pediatric spaces as a central focus of that work, among them a commission by Julia Chiang, whose work is installed at NYC Health + Hospitals/Maimonides. Alongside those commissions, the Arts in Medicine Community Mural Project, believed to be the largest public hospital mural program in the country since the WPA era, has brought community-rooted artists into pediatric units across the system, including Cindy Lozito, whose mural Seasons of Reciprocity lives in the pediatric inpatient unit at NYC Health + Hospitals/Metropolitan.

This panel brings together the artists, advocates, and hospital leaders behind some of that work, including Svetlana Lipyanskaya, President and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals/Maimonides, to examine what intentional, ambitious art does in the spaces where New York's youngest and most vulnerable patients receive care, and what it demands of the public institutions that serve them. Presented in connection with Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier's Alice Mural.
 

Featured Speakers

• Opening Remarks by Rick Luftglass, Executive Director, Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund; Historian
• Julia Chiang, Artist
• Diane Brown, Founder and Executive Director, RxART
• Cindy Lozito, Community Mural Artist, NYC Health + Hospitals; Creator of Seasons of Reciprocity, Pediatric Inpatient Unit, NYC Health + Hospitals/Metropolitan
• Svetlana Lipyanskaya, President and CEO, NYC Health + Hospitals/Maimonides
• Moderated by Larissa W. Trinder, Assistant Vice President, Arts in Medicine, NYC Health + Hospitals