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Hospital installs 800 art pieces to benefit patients, families
Chris Beattie/Staff Photo -- Eight-hundred pieces of art, including sculptures, paintings and photos, provide a distraction and colorful escape for patients and their families at Baylor Medical Center at McKinney, set to open July 6.
By Chris Beattie, cbeattie@starlocalnews.com
Nothing says "heal" like a historic flour mill. Or like flower petals, leaves and landscapes.
Hospital art, when scattered all around, distracts and detracts -- quite healing for a patient lying in agony.
"Sometimes it helps to change their perceptions of pain," said Lydia deJong, director of nursing at Baylor Medical Center at McKinney. "When things are not going their way, they get the ability to escape."
But its décor may stand out most, at least to its temporary residents.
"It just creates that positive distraction, makes the patient and family feel like they're not in that clinical, institutional environment," said Dori Mommers of RTKL Associates, Inc., the facility's architectural and interior design firm. "You don't feel like you're in a hospital."
Rather, you step into an art gallery filled with paintings, photos and sculptures. With aid from Select Art consultants, Mommers picked out 800 pieces of art to adorn the hospital's walls, lobbies and rooms.
More than 100 works were commissioned to local and Texas artists, tasked specifically for hospital corridors.
Floral art -- paintings and photography of abstract flowers -- dot the walls of the second floor, where women and infants receive treatment.
"It reminds me of life and growth," deJong said. "Flowers bloom, and babies are being born."
Seasonal landscapes and Texas scenery cover the third floor, reserved for medical and surgical patients of all ages. And 16 photographs, many that Mommers and her husband captured around downtown McKinney, line the walls around pre-operational and post-surgery waiting areas, just inside the healing garden.
Images stand out from metal, jutting details toward onlookers and passers-by. They feature old and new McKinney landmarks, including the McKinney Performing Arts Center, the Heard-Craig House and the Flour Mill.
"It brings us back to what McKinney used to be," deJong said. "And now, we're the future, going forward."
Blown-up metal leaves descend behind the entrance desk in the main lobby, a backdrop to "The Nurturing Dancers" sculpture that promotes its name to incoming patients and families. Glass art welcomes elevator riders to each floor, providing them beauty and direction, and nature themes dominate throughout.
Where there's canvas, there's color. Where there's pain, there's aesthetic pleasure.
"There is art in every space in the hospital," Mommers said. "When you're in the hospital and waiting for a patient in surgery for six hours, it helps ease your mind and pass the time."
The McKinney location is just the newest of Baylor medical facilities containing purposeful artwork, and joins a trend widespread in modern hospitals, said Susan Hall of Baylor Health Care System. Baylor Medical Center at Plano and Baylor's Fort Worth and Dallas centers all have such art.
Nearly 400 employees have been on-site in McKinney prepping for the opening, and many have taken notice of the artwork's prominence around the hospital, deJong said.
"Every time I go to a new hospital, the artwork surprises me," she said. "The art reminds me of a hospital that's on the cutting edge. They come to get better; it's not where they come to die."
Yet the art may bring relief even in death. Mommers once selected for another facility artwork of a butterfly on a flower, which happened to decorate the room of a mother who lost her baby. The picture touched the mother so much, she had a butterfly put on her baby's gravestone.
Whether in pain, shock or sadness, it sometimes doesn't take much to lift one's spirits. There's healing in the hues.
"I never saw the benefits art has," deJong said. "But being here, I understand."
Residents can get a sneak peek at the hospital during its open house celebration 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. June 30.
For a virtual tour, go to BaylorHealth.com/McKinney.
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