Episode Details

Beginning as a flagship program of the NYC Health + Hospitals’ Arts in Medicine Program, the Community Mural Project built on a mural-making tradition in our public hospitals dating back to FDR’s WPA program for artists in the 1930s. The Community Mural Project commissioned a new generation of artists. Now there are 26 newly created murals, including one in every city hospital and long-term care facility in the nation’s largest municipal health and hospital system.

The Community Mural Project is the largest mural project in public hospitals since the New Deal-era Federal Art Project, which inspired murals in virtually every city hospital in New York.

The book “Healing Walls: New York City Health + Hospitals Community Mural Project 2019-2021” documents the system’s new murals. Larissa Trinder, senior director of the NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine program, shares insights into the role of the arts in the city’s hospital system. The book’s co-editor Rick Luftglass, Executive Director of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, which supports the hospital system’s Arts in Medicine programs, moderates a discussion with Eric Wei, the hospital system’s Senior Vice President and an emergency physician, and art historian Barbara Haskell. The discussion focuses on the historic WPA murals, and explores how today’s Community Mural Project carries forward the Roosevelt tradition while adding the new dimension of collaborative creation.

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