Jeff Koons’ hospital room
Photos by Michael Tropea. Copyright Jeff Koons
RxArt, the brainchild of art dealer and curator Diane Brown, has enjoyed great success pairing artists with hospitals in order to transform them into more welcoming and calmative environments. In the past, the nonprofit has worked with Ed Baynard, John Margolis and R. Crumb, who created a series of kid-friendly coloring books. But Brown admits they’ve always wanted to work with Jeff Koons, whose big, bright pieces are a natural fit for children’s wards. Koons himself has been involved with children’s charities, donating his fee for designing this year’s BMW art car to one. So when RxArt asked him to take the sterile, white CT scanner room at Advocate Hope Children’s Hospital just outside Chicago and turn it into something that would “soothe and cheer young patients and brighten the potentially frightening testing environment,” Koons jumped at the chance, taking no fee for his painted 2D recreations of his iconic Balloon Dog, Hanging Heart, Donkey and Monkeys.
I’d love to hear feedback from some of the child patients. As a two-time childhood concussion survivor myself (thank you, grade school asphalt parking lot/”playground”) I spent my fair share of time in CT scanner rooms, and I don’t know if the happy monkey faces are preferable to a static white environment or if they’re liable to induce circus clown-esque fright, but one look at the obvious improvement in the Before and After picture below leads me to think the former.
