October 15 - December 1, 2024

When we walk onto your unit, or into your hospital room, we don’t want to put you to work by making you paint or clap your hands to a song. We want to learn who you are beyond ‘patient’. It’s okay if you are ‘not an artist’, we know you have interests and passions that can engage and inspire you. Though we are not ‘art therapists’, what we offer is therapeutic. Research continues to show that engaging in, or even chatting about, creative interests can have a lot of different benefits.

As an embedded artist/researcher and Psychiatry graduate student, I curated this exhibition of both staff and patient work relating to the diverse ways that the Artists on the Wards engage the University of Alberta Hospital community, and have done so for 25 years.

-Jennie Vegt