Healing through Art

Some very calming public art in my city - The Leo Mol sculpture garden.

As part of my degree, I’ve spent the last several months interning at an art gallery to learn hands-on curatorial skills. This particular gallery is fairly unique, because it’s actually located inside of a hospital. On Wednesday, the rest of my curatorial team and I hosted a panel discussion on “Healing through Art.”

On our panel, we had four artists working in different mediums talk about how they viewed healing through art. Although I would have liked to have a more diverse panel, they offered some really interesting insights. Most of them spoke about the healing process of creating art in terms of the contemplation it involves. One of them also discussed how grateful he had been for the gallery when he himself was a patient, because it offered a distraction that was mentally engaging and challenging.

I’m not sure that “healing” is the right term for how I personally view art, though. It seems to me that taking in art and having a creative outlet is less about getting better and more about kind of holistic ‘wellness,’ as cheesy as that sounds. It doesn’t always make me feel better to create things (in fact, it sometimes causes me a lot of anxiety), but I do feel worse when it’s not something that I’m actively including in my day-to-day life.

Do you think putting artwork in hospitals is a worthwhile endeavor? Do you find the process of creating art to be healing? What about viewing art?

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