Cleveland clinic healing arts

They manage donated art and are responsible for the site-specific works that have enlivened our largest interiors. Working with limited resources, they have assembled a remarkable collection that pleases, comforts and challenges millions of patients and visitors every year. We are honored that our efforts to integrate art with patient care are recognized by the generous benefactors who donate artwork and funds to expand our collection.

We also appreciate the artists who continue to enrich our lives with their work. Throughout its history, Cleveland Clinic has been at the forefront of exploring different methods of positively affecting patient outcomes.

Fine art is good medicine. It comforts, elevates the spirit, and affirms life and hope. In Cleveland Clinic leadership identified the need to build a contemporary, cohesive and world-class art collection, with a focus on enhancing patient experience. The Art Program was established in as an in-house curatorial department. Since , Ellen Rudolph, Curator and Senior Director, leads the team whose role is to acquire artworks and maintain artistic standards for the whole organization. Integral to the healing environment, the artwork activates and anchors spaces throughout Cleveland Clinic Enterprise.

The art collection is designed to present a broad range of perspectives, promoting empathy and inclusion by making visible the diversity of patients, visitors and caregivers. As with the art, the primary goal is to construct a calming atmosphere for patients and their families. The buildings are meant to be easy to understand and navigate and to serve as supportive, healing places. Works of art can enhance the patient experience when carefully chosen and thoughtfully curated.

The collection has been developed by combining traditional media such as painting, drawing, print and photography with new media including video, digital imagery, computer-generated artworks and mixed media works. All of the healthcare professionals work together to treat patients on the unit, whose average length of stay is three to four days. Two to three nurses work on each shift and are supported by the expressive therapists, mental health workers and licensed clinicians.

In addition, a Cleveland public school teacher provides lessons to patients during the school year. While no data currently exists to measure the effectiveness of the programmatic enhancements, Dr. Varkula and Laffin are considering ways to collect such information. Shella says patients who have experienced trauma may have PTSD, which is believed to be processed in the non-verbal areas of the brain. Individuals who are living with PTSD often experience it through their senses: Sights, sounds, smells or touch.

Shella stresses that while talking about the trauma helps, being able to express it in a non-verbal way can be more effective in helping to relieve it. While Shella works in a hospital, she says that art therapists can be found in a variety of settings. Helping people deal with trauma, end-of-life issues, extended hospitalization, a new, unexpected diagnosis or chronic mental health issues is emotionally taxing work regardless of the tools used during the therapeutic process.

She also says that one of the keys to this practice is working with a credentialed art therapist to meet goals. However, it is not art therapy. Believing that it is would be like saying you had physical therapy because you went for a walk. Another misconception is that art therapy is just for children. Shella says that people of all ages can benefit from it. Art therapy can also be instrumental in helping people:. We very intentionally look for pieces of work that can calm, can comfort, amuse or uplift the person interacting with the art.

It includes both nature and landscapes, but also photography and prints and fine arts prints and sculptures. We have commissioned pieces, paintings. Our main performance area is the Karos Grand Lobby of our main building, our main entrance and that really is a central entry point for people coming into Cleveland Clinic.

We also have a surgery center where mostly families are waiting for their loved ones to come out of surgery.

We have performances there. And then recently, we added weekly performances at the Taussig Cancer Institute, in the outpatient building there. Tom Schorgl: I think one of the things that we saw that was very interesting is the breadth and depth of what was going on throughout Cleveland and Cuyahoga County in terms of a number of different medical facilities and health and human services facilities.

It was many programs and they were programs that were not superficial. They run the gamut from design, from therapies, from research and also assisting their staffs, their workers, in understanding how these therapies can be beneficial. So we started to see that it was broad and deep. I think the other thing for us because the arts always seem to be in a situation where they have to justify their existence was the effect of therapies when it came to comparison to pharmacological therapies, art therapies versus pharmacological therapies.

Maria Jukic: What surprises me every day is really the positive interaction, the positive response that people have to our bringing the arts into the hospital.