Through the Looking Glass of Public Health
Written by Camille Moreno
Published on September 1st, 2026
Most of us begin — and eventually end — our lives inside a healthcare facility. Not counting what happens in between, from accidents to illnesses, being inside some kind of hospital is one of the most universal life experiences there is. Clinical spaces exist, at least in principle, for everyone, and are among the most essential sites of the public realm. They are spaces of sanctity and care, but not always of accessibility.
Healthcare could and should be understood as a public necessity, but access to it is deeply privatized. In the United States, being admitted to a hospital is shaped by a complicated system of copays, deductibles, and social position. Your zip code, employment status, and income can all affect whether you have access to care, how long it takes, what treatment you receive, not to mention how much you pay for it.
The tension between public function and private reality is also all too familiar within the art world.
The tension between public function and private reality is also all too familiar within the art world. Museums and galleries often present themselves as public institutions or spaces of collective access, while operating within systems shaped by private funding, philanthropic privilege, and institutional power. Those who are technically permitted to enter these spaces are not necessarily the same people positioned to participate in, shape, or influence them. And, like the hospital, many people will avoid going altogether if they can help it.
In the art world, decisions about what is collected, preserved, and put on view can sometimes feel as arbitrary as the line items on a medical bill. Just as the cost of a bandage or bottle of medicine can vary depending on where it is provided and who receives it, a work placed inside a museum is granted a different kind of attention — and often a different monetary value — than the same work encountered on a street or in a hospital corridor. In both healthcare and art, context can determine what something is worth, who receives it, and how seriously it is taken.
The presence of art in hospitals can feel similarly incidental, like the physical manifestation of elevator music. It is rarely a priority of corporate collecting and is mostly intended to soften the environment without doing much else.
Few artworks complicate this assumption as powerfully as Abram Champanier’s Alice in Wonderland mural. Currently on view in Another Wonderland, a recently opened exhibition of the restored work at Manhattan’s Museum of the City of New York, the mural has endured a complicated history of public funding, institutional abandonment, private rescue, and renewed public access. Just a stone’s throw from the butterfly-filled meadows at the northern end of Central Park, the exhibition tells the story of a work created not for a museum, but for a public hospital.
Painted between 1938 and 1940 for the children’s ward of Gouverneur Hospital on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in what is now the Two Bridges neighborhood, the sixteen-panel mural was commissioned through the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Champanier’s commission was one of roughly 2,500 murals created through the Federal Art Project, part of the New Deal’s effort to put people to work while bringing art into public spaces.
First opened in 1901, Gouverneur Hospital’s wards were notable for their striking U-shaped walls, a design believed at the time to help mitigate the spread of infectious disease. To accommodate the distinctive architecture, Champanier divided his story into panels that followed the contours of the ward, wrapping around columns and rounded window bays. At a time when hospitalized children had few opportunities to escape their surroundings, the mural offered them a vicarious adventure through the city.
Alice and her motley crew fly over the East River, clamber the Statue of Liberty, and squeeze into a crowded subway car. For children confined to hospital beds, the images offered an imaginative passage beyond their immediate surroundings, connecting an otherwise sterile, austere, and institutional space to the bustling urban realm.
Gouverneur served the area’s largely immigrant communities, and the mural transformed the walls of a place associated with sickness and confinement into an exuberant vision of New York City.
Gouverneur served the area’s largely immigrant communities, and the mural transformed the walls of a place associated with sickness and confinement into an exuberant vision of New York City. It was also a product of a particular understanding of public investment: the hospital, the artwork, and the funding behind it were connected to an idea of the public as something that could be collectively supported and experienced.
After years of overcrowding and understaffing, the hospital lost its accreditation in 1961. The original building fell into decline and was eventually abandoned in 1978, leaving the murals exposed to weather and decay. In 1981, as the building was being gutted, representatives from the Landmarks Preservation Commission contacted paintings conservator Alan Farancz, who, together with his wife, conservator Denise Whitbeck Farancz, and a small group of volunteers, undertook a precarious rescue operation to remove the surviving panels from the children’s ward.
Working without formal authorization, they painstakingly detached the painted canvases from the walls and transported them to safety. Their intervention saved the mural, but it also exposed a question: when a public institution fails to protect something held in common, who is responsible for saving it? The answer, in this case, was not simply the city or the state.
The mural survived through a mixture of individual commitment, informal networks, private fundraising, professional conservation, and, eventually, renewed institutional support.
The mural survived through a mixture of individual commitment, informal networks, private fundraising, professional conservation, and, eventually, renewed institutional support. Restoration stalled for decades when funding ran out. One panel was too badly damaged to save, another disappeared within the hospital system, and two lost panels ultimately had to be recreated. Its survival depended on an uneven chain of people and resources operating across the boundaries of public and private responsibility. The conservation and exhibition of Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York were made possible with leading support from the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, with Bloomberg Philanthropies also supporting the project; the conservation itself, including faithful recreations of the two lost panels, was carried out by John Lippert and Dawn D’Aluisio of Foreground Conservation.
The exhibition’s slideshow of other artworks displayed inside NYC hospitals — including works by Keith Haring, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler — places Champanier’s mural within a continuing legacy of public art in healthcare environments. A hospital can become an exhibition space without becoming a museum; patients, staff, and visitors can encounter artworks without ever choosing to enter an art institution. Unlike a museum, which asks its visitors to make a deliberate choice to enter, a hospital is a place people may enter because they have no choice.
The encounter is incidental as much as intentional: art is encountered while seeking care. Here, art can reach people who may never seek it out elsewhere, becoming part of an environment of care rather than an object separated from everyday life and presented to an audience that has already chosen to participate.
Research into the effects of art in healthcare environments has increasingly supported this approach, suggesting that encounters with art can help reduce stress and improve experiences for patients, families, and caregivers. This evidence underpins the work of Arts in Medicine as it expands and reshapes medical environments across the city’s five boroughs. But the presence of art in a hospital also raises questions that go beyond its therapeutic value. What does it mean to encounter art in an institution where access itself is not equally distributed?
The hospital and the art institution meet in an uneasy space between public promise and private reality. Both claim some relationship to the collective good, while both are shaped by systems of funding and governance that determine who can access them. The difference is that access to healthcare is a matter of necessity, while access to art is more often treated as a matter of choice. Yet who is actually able to participate in either system is not so different.
Perhaps the significance of bringing art into these environments lies in this contradiction.
Perhaps the significance of bringing art into these environments lies in this contradiction. Alice does not resolve the question of what makes a space public; instead, it makes the question harder to ignore. Art may be placed in a hospital in the name of healing, but the hospital itself remains a site where the inequalities of the wider society are concentrated. The question, then, is not simply whether these institutions are open to everyone, but what conditions determine who can meaningfully participate in them — and who has the power to shape what they hold in common.
Today, the distinctive former hospital building provides supportive housing for low-income adults. The hospital continued at a new location and is now known as NYC Health + Hospitals/Gouverneur. The restored mural will return to the hospital system that commissioned it, four blocks from its original home, where all sixteen panels will eventually be accessible across three floors, with some visible from the street.
The mural’s return is part of a much larger commitment to bringing art into New York’s public healthcare system. NYC Health + Hospitals’ Arts in Medicine stewards more than 8,000 works across the system’s 11 acute-care hospitals, 29 Gotham Health sites, and five long-term or skilled-nursing facilities.
The tradition of commissioning art for hospitals continues through initiatives such as the Community Mural Project, which brings contemporary artists into dialogue with hospital staff, patients, and local communities. The resulting works are intended not simply as decoration, but as part of a broader approach to healthcare that uses art to promote belonging, build trust, and create environments that support healing.
Camille Moreno is a Costa Rican-American writer and curator based in Berlin. Her writing investigates how art operates within social structures, foregrounding accessibility and the everyday as sites of critical and imaginative potential. She has written for cultural publications in Germany, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, contributing essays, criticism, and interviews that address visual art, architecture, and cultural politics from an international perspective.
Insta: @camillebeaucoup