Healing With The Arts
Radical Connections transforms healthcare with all kinds of artists. Connecting the arts and health improves quality of life for residents, patients, and everyone working in and visiting healthcare settings. Creative participation is crucial for humanizing healthcare by celebrating individuals as well as the diversity of cultures, abilities, and communities.
Our Vision
Mission Statement
Wellness, for all, involves the opportunity to play, create and make choices. People in care need those same opportunities. Participation in the arts brings joy and connection; it demonstrates that people receiving care are much more than their medical conditions.
Elder care needs radical transformation. With our help, elders and everyone in healthcare can share their wisdom and enjoy arts and culture.
People experiencing mental or physical distress should be surrounded by healing environments. We bring meaningful music, visual, literary, or movement-based arts into hospitals and care settings.
True creative participation humanizes care by celebrating a diversity of individuals, cultures, abilities, and communities. Connecting arts and health improves quality of life for residents, patients, visitors, and everyone working in healthcare.
We improve care and strengthen communities by bringing artists and people in healthcare together.
Current Initiatives
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Community Connections
Radical Connections is partnering with the Dementia Society of Ottawa and Renfrew County to bring virtual one-on-one sessions to seniors in their homes. RC artists will also be performing in-person in the upcoming weeks and months at DSORC’s weekly Daisy Café.
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Storytelling in Palliative Care
Professional storyteller Kim Kilpatrick will work with patients, Family Caregivers, and Healthcare staff in crafting 55-word stories or poems. The participants may offer their story for analysis and to share with a wider audience through events at Bruyère, the Ottawa Art Gallery and academic and medical conferences.
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Unmasked Connections
Musicians, storytellers, actors, & poets partnered with healthcare organizations, support staff, families, & volunteers to deliver virtual concerts to vulnerable populations in hospitals, and residences.
Visit: the Directory of Artists
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Curatorial Collaboration
An ongoing project addressing medicalized spaces as vessels for quality art, active imagination, & user-agency. Interdisciplinary-social-practice artist, Maren Kathleen Elliott, is exploring innovative & inclusive approaches to curation at Bruyère’s St.-Vincent Hospital, and beyond! Learn more. This work is supported through:
City of Ottawa Creation & Production grant
Arts Network Ottawa Mentorship program.
Bruyère Academic Medical Organization
“In the age of life-long learning,
creative engagement is the new fitness class.”
