The Walking Gallery of Healthcare from Eidolon Films on Vimeo.
Artist-activist Regina Holliday, who has championed patient access to medical data since her husband's death in 2009, has started a crowd-funding campaign to help establish a center that will promote wellness and healing through art.
Holliday hopes to raise at least $75,000 on MedStartr through Dec. 30 as seed funding to buy a vintage house in rural Western Maryland and turn the property into the Walking Gallery Center for Art and Healing.
The name comes from Holliday's Walking Gallery of Healthcare, a series of paintings she and other artists have done on the backs of jackets, illustrating difficult healthcare experiences each wearer has endured. To date, Holliday has painted 310 jackets, and 35 other artists have contributed at least one each.
The center will include rooms for artists-in-residence and others for patients recovering from cancer treatment. Holliday is collaborating with Cancer101, a nonprofit that helps cancer patients and their caregivers become "engaged" as partners with their care teams. That mission fits with her own support of Partnership for Patients, a patient-centric effort of the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Visiting patients will be those who have just completed chemotherapy and other difficult treatment regimes so they can have a "window of decompression" in a healing environment prior to returning to work, Holliday says. "It's a chance to re-center yourself," Holliday says, borrowing a phrase from Cancer101 Executive Director Sarah Krug.
The center will feature "elements of healing as well as art," according to Holliday. It will have gallery spaces for rent and classrooms for art, music, fitness and dance, as well as a meeting and event facilities.
The proposed location, in the tiny town of Grantsville, Md., is meant to contribute to the healing, she says. Holliday expects to use the building for an annual Walking Gallery meeting; when combined with two other events 155 miles away in Washington, D.C., she envisions something like "Burning Man meets healthcare," with the goal of "reigniting the fire within us all."
Holliday is planning the second-annual Walking Gallery event, called #Cinderblocks2, in Grantsville June 4-6, chartering buses to transport people from the Health Data Consortium's Health Datapalooza conference, set for May 31-June 3. Just before Health Datapalooza next spring is Washington's comic convention, Awesome Con, and Holliday, a fan of cosplay, said she has gotten Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic to sponsor a Walking Gallery booth there because many of the jackets have superhero themes.
"Why can't we have conferences where dance and art are combined?" Holliday says. Art will be presented in the context of healing, wellness and health.
The first choice of properties for the Walking Gallery Center for Art and Healing, according to Holliday, is a century-old, five-bedroom house in Grantsville that she says was, appropriately, once owned by the town's only doctor and his wife, an artist. She has three backups lined up if she is unable to buy that house.
