Treasures Lost, Treasures Found: New Deal Murals at NYC Health+ Hospitals

About the Event

New York has been doing arts and health at civic scale for nearly a century. In the 1930s, WPA artists across the five boroughs created murals for the city's public hospitals, working at architectural scale in rotundas, wards, and waiting rooms, for the New Yorkers who would receive and deliver care there every day. NYC Health + Hospitals holds one of the most significant collections of these works of any health system in the country, and many remain in place, part of the daily life of our hospitals.

For the artists, cultural organizations, clinicians, and advocates in this network, these murals are a shared inheritance and a working model. They show what our city built when it treated art as public infrastructure, and they speak directly to the work many of you are doing now, commissioning murals with communities, bringing artists into care settings, and building the case for arts and health in New York policy. The murals going up in our clinics and neighborhoods today join this same lineage.

Hosted by the Living New Deal, this webinar includes a walk-through of the Bellevue rotunda and David Margolis's WPA-era mural Materials of Relaxation, restored after years out of view. Dr. Eric Wei, CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, speaks to how the mural serves staff, patients, and visitors today. Ryan Patrick of Arts in Medicine connects this history to how we commission and curate large-scale work across our hospitals now. Rick Luftglass of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund shares his research on the WPA murals that have been saved and can be seen by the public.

To learn more about Materials of Relaxation by David Margolis, visit the Living New Deal site.