Everyone knows what sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room is like. It can feel sterile or intimidating. It can cause stress or anxiety. But what if the art you saw on the wall in your doctor’s waiting room took you to another place, made you smile, or recall a happy memory in your life? The MetroHealth System wants to do just that. MetroHealth’s Arts in Medicine program is improving patient, visitor, and staff experience through visual art, music, the arts therapies, performances, and exhibits. MetroHealth has partnered with LAND studio to curate intentional art installations in waiting rooms, lobbies, and patient care rooms throughout their facilities. The new artwork aligns with the visual art program’s themes of hope, healing, and community.

Working with the Office of Patient Experience, LAND studio is curating artwork and commissioning new installations by local, regional, national, and international artists. LAND has worked with 60 artists resulting in more than 200 artworks for a new Critical Care Pavilion, a new health and surgery center in Brecksville, and smaller areas on the W. 25^th Street main campus and neighborhood facilities in Crocker Park, Brunswick, and Lyndhurst.

Upcoming and established local artists such as Darius Steward, Corrie Slawson, and Lisa Schonberg created new artworks that are adding to the variety and depth of MetroHealth’s growing art collection. Local artist Lauren Herzak-Bauman created an 18-piece, large-scale interactive installation using thousands of hand-painted ceramic disks that invites patients and visitors to touch and change the artwork. In Brecksville, local artist Mimi Kato created her first series of large-scale permanent works for a public institution. Four archival prints that together span over 22 feet hang in a patient waiting area and depict playful scenes that evoke humor and fairytale in the Japanese pictorial style and incorporate scenes from Brecksville’s Metroparks.

LAND studio and MetroHealth are partnered for the next two years to expand this project. A quote by Dr. Akram Boutros, President and Chief Executive Officer of The MetroHealth System gives light to the organization’s intention in the partnership: “Art in medicine is critical as it offers an opportunity for us to receive what we all need – to connect as human beings. No matter what, we all need a connection and someone to care about us. Art reminds us of our humanity.”

 

LAND Studio

1939 West 25th Street, Suite 200

Cleveland, Ohio 44113

land-studio.org

216.621.5413

Artist Lauren Herzak-Bauman (Cleveland). Anicca, 18 aluminum mandalas and 2200 ceramic glazed discs, 2016. Anicca is the Buddhist word for impermanence. The ceramic disks are attached by pins to the metal plates. The community is invited to spin the discs and affect the ever-evolving patterns of change in this work.

 

Artist Mimi Kato (Cleveland). Down the River, Up the Sea – Archival inkjet print, 2016. In the style of traditional Japanese pictorial models, Kato digitally weaves humor and fairy tale into a known landscape, the Cleveland Metroparks, and to the world beyond.  Kato calls her work one-person theater, as she photographs herself in the various costumes and disguises and builds stories influenced by the her Japanese childhood, fables, and humorous attention the human condition.