Art used to heal children’s anxiety over illness

Featured on sfgate.com

 For Dorkas Kaya and other young patients with HIV, seeing the walls of their residential treatment center transformed with broad splashes of color and graffiti-like scribbles brought a singular reaction: “Whoa!”

Artist Jose Parla spent several days last week decorating bedrooms, hallways and common areas of the Incarnation Children’s Center in his signature improvisational style, the latest project in a charitable effort that commissions top contemporary artists to make pediatric health facilities less intimidating.

“We were all like ‘whoa,’ yelling, ‘cause it’s so different,” said Kaya, a 19-year-old who has been in the center for three years. “I like the colors. It brings life to the place.”

The nonprofit RxArt’s simple mission is to help children heal through the power of art by taking their mind off their surroundings, even for just a little while. They’ve brought in an impressive roster of artists to pediatric wards across the country to create original works on walls, ceilings, floors, even medical equipment.

In fact, former art dealer Diane Brown founded RxArt 15 years ago out of her own claustrophobia of CAT scan machines.

“I was having a CAT scan and I was terrified,” she recalled. Her only escape was using her imagination to think about a painting by one of her favorite artists, Matthew Ritchie.

RxArt has worked with such artists as Jeff Koons at Advocate Children’s Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill.; Kenny Scharf at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn; Urs Fischer at the Cedar-Sinai Maxine Dunitz Children’s Health Center in Los Angeles; and John Monti at Children’s Hospital Boston. Thirty-two projects are complete. Seven more are in the pipeline.

Koons’ project decorated a CAT scan machine with decals of his famous monkey images.

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