Art Bridges looks to bring art deeper into health care
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Art Bridges Foundation is examining hospital-art strategies and could eventually help museums and health care providers build arts programs that could have positive outcomes for patients.
Why it matters: NWA could become a testing ground for using art to offer patients a sense of calm, give families a moment of reprieve and help health care workers reset.
Driving the news: The foundation gathered nearly 20 hospital curators from the U.S. and Canada at Crystal Bridges on Aug. 20 to compare how they select, install and evaluate art.
- Founded by Alice Walton, Art Bridges partners with more than 400 museums nationwide to help share American art with other communities.
The big picture: Hospital curators increasingly treat art as part of the care environment, not decoration added after construction, several of the curators said.
Case in point: At NYC Health + Hospitals, the Arts in Medicine department sits within the Office of Quality and Safety. The department is held to standards similar to clinical teams and evaluates its programs through research partnerships and staff surveys, curator Ryan Patrick told Axios.
- "Visual art, we consider it to be like a form of hospital equipment and truly a form of clinical infrastructure," he said. "We think it should be measured, supported, and researched as such."
Patrick's team studies a clinical unit, selects art with frontline staff, installs it guided by environmental design psychology and then evaluates the response.
- Staff are a primary audience because caring for them can carry through to patients, Patrick said.
Yes, but: So-called universally soothing imagery is not universal.
- Soft colors, landscapes and flowers may work in some hospitals. In New York, some patients and employees described nature scenes as lonely or merely decorative, Patrick said.
- The lesson is to respond to the community rather than prescribe a single visual cure, Patrick said.
Zoom out: Other curators shared their practices, which were all tailored to their collections, campus sizes and clinical needs.
State of play: The foundation and its local partners may try some of the approaches discussed at the meeting as a health campus in Bentonville is developed, Art Bridges CEO Anne Kraybill told Axios.
- That could include indoor and outdoor art and broader programming.
What's next: Art Bridges plans to eventually build a digital resource — a practical playbook — where arts and health care professionals can find guidance, connect and ask questions.
- Longer term, it hopes to bring museums and health care providers together to design programs for their communities, Kraybill said.