Visual Arts

What We Do
• Maintain and exhibit inventory of over 2000 original artworks, almost entirely by North Carolina artists, including drawings, paintings, photographs, pottery, prints, sculpture and weavings throughout the Medical Center.
• Place original art in patient rooms.
• Partner with state agencies, community organizations, local arts associations, artists groups and co-ops to bring arts resources of North Carolina into the hospital.
• Produce annual Employee Arts and Crafts show

The Program
“He hadn’t said a word all morning,” a nurse says in astonishment of her pajama-clad patient sitting in his wheelchair.  Yet she has just witnessed him engaging me, for fifteen minutes, in a discussion about a painting he saw me hang in one of our many art galleries at Duke Hospital.  Viewing art provided this patient with an opportunity to view himself as more than his illness. Many times I see a great work of art produce a kind of contentment in a patient’s face.  This positive state of being, be it intellectual or psychological, is definitely spiritual, and that has to have a definite physical effect. 

Choosing to be the recipient of or participant in an art experience can give a patient direct control over his or her internal well-being, while he or she is at a loss for external control in the hospital. 

Just as the reading of the Nikki Giovanni poem that describes the cutting and squeezing of a lemon causes the mouth to pucker as if it is actually tasting the fruit, so does the viewing of a Jacob Cooley meadow make the lungs expand as if they’re actually breathing fresh field air. Art gives a patient that intangible something that his or her body wants and needs, working in tandem with the high quality medical care Duke provides.

I love this work!