by: Ellen C. Caldwell
for JSTOR Daily
Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital is in the process of a huge building expansion project. Opening in 2017, the expansion focuses not just on sustainability and state of the art machinery, but also on healing gardens and play rooms. They are not the first hospital to rethink healing spaces. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for instance, develops and curates atop notch art collection throughout the campus, offering daily guided art tours.
It has long been believed that there is an underlying healing power of of art—both making art and simply experiencing it. In 1984, Jeremy Hugh Baron and Lesley Greene studied art in hospitals, noting that “hospitals have been designed and built for high quality medical care. Few have been designed to be beautiful.”
Hospitals working to prioritize an arts budget and curator must believe deeply in this endeavor—and be willing to pay for it…