Nobody goes to a hospital to see art, and yet there’s often art all around you when you visit a hospital. Whether you are sick, or someone you love is sick, or you work at the hospital, nobody’s first priority is to pay attention to a particular painting on the wall, or a sculpture that you pass on your way from one place to the next. And yet, the art shown in hospitals is part of the experience.
Earlier this month, I found myself at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota on and off over the course of nearly two weeks. On many of the days I was there, I’d pass by a triptych by a Moscow-born, Baltimore-based artist named Yulia Hanansen. She uses stained glass in the three works, but they almost look like paintings from a distance. The first, “Water Lily,” makes you feel as if you’re hovering above the oversized flowers, blooming on their lily pads with a blue sky and mountains in the distance. The second piece, “Black-eyed Susan,” depicts yellow flowers stretching up toward the sunlight, while the third, “Fern,” gives each fern a whimsical curve. I was having a stressful time during my time in Rochester, but each time I’d pass this series of mosaics, I did take a moment to find the peace in their vivid natural scenes.
I was at Mayo because my father had open heart surgery earlier this month. He had one valve replaced, another repaired, and the doctors sewed up a tear he apparently had since birth. Everything went well, except he contracted pneumonia and was in a scary spot for a while before finally he was well enough to come home last week. My four siblings and I took turns being present in the ICU with my dad and caring for my mother.
On weekdays, when construction wasn’t happening, I’d walk my mother from our nearby hotel to the main entrance where there’s a beautiful translucent artwork above the front doors. Rainbow colors flow diagonally across the half circle. The earth and sky meet at a jagged horizon line, but it’s also a piece that abstracts nature. There’s perhaps a giant sun engulfing the sky. It intersects with a river of color in a piece that defies gravity and even time.
I don’t know who the artist is, and I haven’t been able to figure it out by searching on the internet (if you happen to know— please email me, and I’ll write an update in the Artscape newsletter). As far as I’ve found, there isn’t a central place where the Mayo lists all of its art works. It strikes me that though they do have a number of blue chip items from the likes of Andy Warhol, Joan Miró, and Auguste Rodin, the art isn’t really supposed to be the main focus. It’s really an amenity for the people that use that building.
My father’s recent ordeal isn’t the first time I’ve had rather profound connections to artwork at the Mayo Clinic. The first time happened in 2017. My beloved late former partner had been at an alcohol treatment center in Rochester, and wound up with severe hypertension, landing him in the E.R. at the Mayo Clinic.
I drove down there, upset and scared, and I got rather lost at first. I was actually on the wrong campus entirely, wandering around the Methodist Campus when I was supposed to be at St. Mary’s. I was shaking with frustration and then I looked up and noticed a glimmer of color and light. I stopped thinking about where I was going and marveled at Dale Chihuly’s amoeba-like chandeliers. There are 13 of them in the Gonda Building, and are quite miraculous. It was a moment of beauty in a terrible time.
Later in that trip I was at a cafeteria in the Methodist Campus that’s located underground and I remember looking up at this beautiful skylight opening up to the ground level, peeking up at the historic Mayo buildings that surround it. There was something about taking in the sky and the architecture that I found very calming.
Artist Jodi Reeb, whose work is at the Mayo and a number of different hospitals, has a painted aluminum piece there called “Blue Waters” that blossoms out like a flower. She has a series of small blown glass pieces that are called “Water Crossing,” and an encaustic work called “Azure” that sports an assortment of soothing blue and turquoise colors. Reeb told me that she purposefully seeks out partnerships with places of healing, and I wasn’t surprised at all. Reeb’s work is playful and bright, and it seems natural that someone going through a tough time would find solace in it. The heightened circumstances of a hospital really make for a more intense connection between the person viewing the art and the artist behind it.
The artwork that I saw each day on my way to my dad’s room in the Mary Brigh building was like it was there for me personally. When my mother and I walked into the prayer/meditation room in the Brigh building, the light from the swirling green and blue stained glass window shone all around us. That day, we also visited the Peace Garden outside of St. Mary’s Hospital and stopped to enjoy the St. Francis of Assisi statues they have there— with only a helicopter lifting off from a nearby rooftop interrupting our meditation.
In a way, my experience of the art was more intimate than, say, visiting a museum. While it wasn’t art that I owned, I felt it was there just for me somehow during this stressful time.
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.