When Art is No LongerJust a Pretty Picture:Art for Advocacy and Social Change

A patient activist perspective by Regina Holliday

Art. That’s for kids, right?

Art can be “safe.”

It can be containedwithin waiting rooms and rolling art carts.

Art can be pinned down upon a sheet of construction paper

StaticStillA waxwork of emotion.It can be a moment of process with no intent.

Or it can be more.

Art can make clinical spaces “pretty.”But as any child can tell you,it can be dangerous to enter candy houses.

Art can be used to

mask the rotten apple or it can be used to

reveal it.

Writing on the Wall.

(or what one widow can do with a borrowed ladderan available wall and $500.00 in paint.)

They can Write it on a Wall.

How can an outsider artist,send a message to us all?

Painting Advocacy meets

Social Media

Street art is truly the first global art movement fueled by the Internet. –Marc and Sara Schiller, Wooster Collective, 2010

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” ~Aristotle

This is the painting 73 cents.

This painting, like the internet, advocates 24 hours a day and you cannot tell a wall to shut up.

Next Steps: Why not paint open access hospital data sets…

…in front of said hospital?

Why not paint about the need for better hygiene practices and then enter that painting in an online vote competition?

Sometimes “blowing a gasket” leads to the best kind of collaborative disruption. Crowd-funding exists to make the impossible possible….

Patient Scholarships

You can crowd fund in healthcare.

Where are the HOSPICE cards?There is nothing between “Get Well” and “Sympathy”

Where are the faces of the dying and those that love them?

#TweetChat can change the conversation.

#EOL#Tedmed#DWDchat#hospice

#HospiceCards

Become a reality

The Walking Gallery

The more stickers that are out there the more important it seems. The more important it seems, the more people want to know what it is.The more they ask they ask each other.

It gains real power from perceived power. -Shepard Fairey

We can redefine expectations of how we communicate in medicine at every hospital, clinic and conference.

Let Patients Speak

We must encourage every committee, conference and hospital board, to actively recruit and include patients in every aspect of the care process from design to implementation to resolution.

Invite patients and you will include artists,poets and writers in creating health policy.

Are you ready to jump?