Healthcare: a critical site for Culture
Petra Halkes, 2011. Strip. Oil on canvas, 3.5′ x 10′. “The lightness and speed of our electronic and migratory age fulfill human desires to forget decay and death, and at times provide exhilaration and beauty. The other-worldly senses of artificial light reflect our own contrived cosmos and desires to transcend this sphere. Paint with its drips, flows, clots, and cracks can remind artists of the biological reality of our own deteriorating bodies.”
The Arts: a major contributor to Quality of Life.
See more about matching your specific skill-sets, and interest in humanity, under the Healthcare menu.
“ …patients experienced increased internal recognition for their capabilities and improved their relationships with their own body. ”
Impact of an Artist-in-Residence program in a Complex Continuing Care Hospital: A Quality Improvement Investigation.
Bruyère Research Institute, Ottawa
The participant can often lead you
You are:
Curious
Accepting
Innovative
Enthusiastic about transforming healthcare through access to the arts
Interested in a diversity of cultures and abilities
Ideally, experienced with:
Elders
Community building
Teaching
Prepare
What you need to do / know before working in healthcare:
Glossary of common healthcare terms
Understand the mission and guiding values of the particular residence or organization
Obtain Vulnerable Sector Police Check at your local police station
Check the Occupation Health requirements, including Covid-19 vaccinations
Radical Connections will offer general orientation for artists working in healthcare. You may need to attend specific site orientation hosted by healthcare organizations.
You will be building Community while working with:
Elders
People with dementia
Diverse populations
People with different abilities
The Community in healthcare includes:
long-term residents, hospital patients, family members, all staff, physicians, volunteers, visitors AND arts workers.
Before you apply, learn more about what we do.
Two care-based, Artists’ Residencies that focussed on the visual arts
The Bruyère Organizations’s St-Vincent Hospital, Ottawa;
Sherbrooke Community Centre, Saskatoon
Social practice that brings cultural access and creative engagement to vulnerable populations; while breaking through silo-thinking, and building friendship and respect.
Arts as a compassionate act: cj fleury and Dr. Carol Wiebe speak at Bruyere’s Compassionate Care panel discussion hosted by Globe and Mail health columnist Andre Picard.
Apply to become a Radical Connections Artist
“..we have all these different tropes for the different kinds of teenagers there are. The nerd the jock, the popular girl, the science kid ... a huge diversity. And with seniors we tend to paint them all with one brush stroke.”
— Jennifer Recknagel, p.204, in Happily Ever Older: Revolutionary Approaches to Long-Term Care. Moira Welsh, 2021
Hannah Ranger. Aerial, 2017. Wool, flax, silk. Ranger identifies fibre art as a primary medium and a big part of the foundation of cultures around the world; not only a medium through which societies were able to develop necessities such as clothing, carrying mechanisms, even housing and other technologies, textile work is a form of expression and identification from within the culture.