Healing Power of Art in The City of Angels

Reposted from Art is Moving Blog

After my Yelping rant on Friday about the lack of having an Arts and Culture in our institutions, I was so delighted and excited to find this amazing news about the healing Art Collection in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

From the  CBS Broadcast

History of the Healing Power of Art at Cedars

It was 1966 and Frederick R. Weisman, a Los Angeles business leader and art lover, had slipped into a coma after suffering a head injury. Though he returned to consciousness after several days in the hospital, he remained dazed and disoriented. His wife, Marcia Simon Weisman, also an influential art collector, grew alarmed as her husband struggled to remember her name.
“Mrs. Weisman would bring pieces from their private art collection to the hospital and leave them by her husband’s bedside so he would see them when he opened his eyes,” said John T. Lange, curator of the Cedars-Sinai art collection.

“He could make that connection to the work of art before he could make the connection to who his wife was,” Lange said of Weisman’s first step toward recovery. “There was an obvious relationship between the art and his recovery. Cedars-Sinai’s vast art collection owes its legacy to a patient’s recovery a half-century ago

Current News about the Art Collection



On a Sunday morning CBS broadcast, news correspondent Bill Whitaker takes a tour through the 1,000 pieces of modern art on display at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

The hospital is the unexpected home to one of L.A.’s most extensive contemporary art collections featuring work by such notable names as Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

“We’re trying to create an environment conducive to healing,” John T. Lange, curator of the collection, tells Whitaker. “So all of the work that’s on the walls is for the patients, for the visitors, for the staff. The idea is to give them a pleasant distraction, to uplift their spirit.”

The report also features doctors and patients discussing the ways artworks can complement the healing process.

Emily Talmantes, who suffers from Addison’s disease, says she finds comfort in photographs of President Kennedy, who suffered from the same illness.
“I imagine what he’s thinking, by just his expressions,” she tells Whitaker. “And that completely took me out of all of this for that moment. And that, to me, is a process of healing LA TIMES CULTURE MONSTER


This Is The Way It Is Suppose To Be!

Next step, they should and need to have ARTcarts in the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center . Or maybe they can just start with having an ARTbreak Day with us in September.  I will try to find out who to contact.


Also, this inspiring news makes me want to reactivate my Carpe Diem LA website, which is an insiders guide to The City Angels and all its secret treasures.

Do you have any secret arts and healing treasures in your communities?

Please share.

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