Art to be part of healing process at hospital

By Victoria Hurley-Schubert

While the shelves will be fully stocked with bandages, gauze and tape to heal wounds as patients come for treatments at the new University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro, all will be exposed to one universal therapy — artwork.

 
Installing artwork in hospitals is a growing trend across the United States, as a growing body of research shows art has healing powers.
 
“Our job is to improve the patients’ experience here or anything that improves their clinical outcome is our job to provide,” said Barry Rabner, CEO of Princeton HealthCare System. “It’s not just X-rays and MRIs, it’s also art.”
 
Art can help lower blood pressure, reduce the need for pain medications, decrease stress and help people feel better faster.
 
Realizing a hospital is a stressful place for people, “anything you can do to reduce stress is worth dong,” said Mr. Rabner. “Stress translates into physical issues, it translates into errors, so it’s important to do whatever you can to address it.”
 
An art committee and Mr. Rabner chose the pieces for the new hospital off Route 1 at Plainsboro Road. To assist with the process of identifying artists and choosing art, the committee engaged Rosalyn Cama, a practicing health care designer for 30 years, fellow of the American Society of Interior Designers, chairwoman of the board of directors for the Center for Health Design, and author of “Evidence-Based Healthcare Design.”
 
“I am extremely gratified that this concept, so obvious to artists, is now accepted in the medical profession,” said Marie Sturken, a Princeton printmaker and papermaker with two works on handmade paper on display at the new hospital. She has works displayed other hospitals and medical centers, and in the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York.
 
For the viewer, art can bring beauty and light into the world and help one forget one’s own pain and suffering. It elevates and soothes and can bring a sense of wonder and joy,” said said Hetty Baiz, a Princeton artist who creates animal images with multi media paper and paint. “Just like listening to calming music or meditation, art can provide a point of rest, colors and forms that soothe and intrigue, help one to step outside of oneself and enter a more wondrous space.”
 
Her husband, Jim Perry, is a sculptor who is also included in the hospital collection.
 
Ms. Cama, president of New Haven, Conn.-based Cama Inc. and chair of the board of directors of Concord, Calif.-based Center for Health Design, helped choose artwork and worked with the artists to procure pieces.
 
An art committee was formed very early on and a lot of what you see in this project was truly an integrated design process and community stakeholders were engaged,” she said at a conference about the design of the hospital earlier this month. “This is an academic community with strong accomplished artists … It was wonderful to engage them in early conversations and decision-making about how this embraced the community and so on.”
 
The pieces of art become landmarks for patients and visitors, helping them remember their way around with a sense of imagery, color or place, said Ms. Cama.
 
Much of the more than 200 pieces in the collection are by local artists, and many of them with disabilities, said Mr. Rabner. Works from more than a dozen Princeton-area artists are featured around the new hospital, which is scheduled to open on May 22.
 
“I am vey pleased to have my work included in the new hospital’s collection. I feel it then becomes part of the community, seen by many, and will help somewhat to ease the difficult conditions of the patients who need to be there,” said Princeton artist Charles McVicker, who also has pieces displayed at the new Capital Health Hospital in Hopewell. “From my own experience, I know that pleasant surroundings make such situations a bit easier. I do think art can have a place in the healing experience. Anything that uplifts the thought of one who is recovering is helpful, I believe.”
 
“We have some watercolors that were done by a quadriplegic man who holds the brush in his teeth and we have two sculptures that were done by a Princeton man (Gordon Gund) who also happens to be blind,” said Mr. Rabner. “There’s one he describes to be a salmon, it’s curved and the head and tail are near are each other, and I asked Mr. Gund how he did that, and he said he went to the fish market and bought a salmon and felt it and manipulated it and bent it to understand how it should look and what the natural curve is to it. It’s remarkable.”
 
A renowned sculptor and Princetonian, Mr. Gund – the former majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA team – lost his sight more than 40 years ago from retinitis pigmentosa.
 
“I am very excited that the University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro owns two of my sculptures and will have them on display there for years to come,” said Mr. Gund, whose bronze sculptures will be located in the meditation garden and the Cancer Treatment Center’s reflection pool. “I hope that viewing them and touching them will provide a calming, pleasing diversion to patients, their families and other visitors.
 
   ”While I’ve sold some of my sculptures, I’m a long way from being a professional artist. First and foremost, I do it because I really enjoy it. It is real therapy for me to take images from my mind and turn them into something tangible with my hands. It is then especially satisfying if they are pleasing to others to touch and to see,” said Mr. Gund. “Art is very healing to me both in enjoying the work of others and in creating it myself.
 
“I was particularly happy that the University Medical Center of Princeton has these, because it is an extraordinary resource for our community and has been extremely important over the years to my wife and me and our family.”
 
Mr. Rabner’s favorite piece is one by Eric Mohn, the quadriplegic man.
 
“It’s much more than art when I look at it,” he said.
 
His office is adorned with pieces by an artist with Down Syndrome and a traumatic brain injury from a car accident.
 
Existing pieces in the soon-to-be decommissioned hospital will be redistributed among the Princeton Health Care properties, said Mr. Rabner.
 
The goal is to position Princeton HealthCare System in the vanguard of hospital systems using art in health care.
 
Local artists with works as part of the collection: Joanne Augustine, Rocky Hill; Hetty Baiz, Princeton; Anita Benard, Princeton; Mary Cross, Princeton;Carol Hanson, Skillman; Eve Ingalls, Princeton; Renee Kumar, Princeton Junction;Marsha Levin-Rojer, Princeton; Charles McVicker, Princeton; Ernest Ruben, Princeton; Joy Saville, Princeton; Marie Sturken, Princeton; Elaine Vrable, Millstone Township.