Art Collection

NYC Health + Hospitals stewards one of the largest public hospital art collections in the United States, more than 8,000 works spanning nearly a century of American and international art. The collection includes paintings, works on paper, photography, sculpture, and large-scale murals, and is deployed across all eleven of our hospitals and dozens of community health centers throughout New York City’s five boroughs.

The collection is a clinical strategy. Research, including the World Health Organization’s 2019 evidence synthesis of over 900 peer-reviewed publications, documents that thoughtfully curated art in healthcare environments reduces stress, lowers cortisol levels, supports emotional regulation, and improves perceptions of safety, dignity, and quality of care. At NYC Health + Hospitals, we match works to spaces and communities with that evidence in mind, from the lobbies where patients form their first impression of care, to behavioral health milieus where the emotional register of a work shapes the conditions for healing, to pediatric spaces where art communicates to children and families that this institution knows and honors who they are. The collection spans WPA-era murals commissioned for New York City’s public hospitals in the 1930s, among them works by Charles Alston and Ilya Bolotowsky that remain on our walls today, to major contemporary commissions by Mickalene Thomas, Keith Haring, Ebony Bolt, Derrick Adams, and Nina Chanel Abney. It encompasses significant works by female artists, Latino artists, and Black artists, and reflects a sustained commitment to representing the full range of the communities we serve. The collection has been built through acquisition, donation, commission, and the sustained support of philanthropic partners including the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund.

Read the insightful New York Times article highlighting our art collection.

Another Wonderland Exhibition

NOW OPENING JUNE 6: Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural Museum of the City of New York, June 6 to September 20, 2026 Presented in collaboration with NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund.

Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural

On view at the Museum of the City of New York, June 6 to September 20, 2026

Among the most remarkable works in the Arts in Medicine collection is Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York, a sixteen-panel mural cycle created between 1938 and 1940 by artist Abram Champanier for the children’s ward at Gouverneur Hospital in Lower Manhattan. Commissioned through the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the series reimagined Lewis Carroll’s beloved characters exploring 1930s New York City, from the subway and the Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island and Central Park, bringing color, fantasy, and joy to a space dedicated to healing the city’s youngest and most vulnerable patients.

After Gouverneur Hospital closed and faced demolition in the 1980s, the panels were rescued and underwent decades of painstaking conservation. They are now on public view together for the first time in nearly fifty years. Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural, presented by the Museum of the City of New York in collaboration with NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, brings the full series to light alongside archival photographs, conservation documentation, and original hospital ephemera. The exhibition is a testament to what Arts in Medicine has always believed: that art made for healing spaces is worth preserving, and that the communities served by our hospitals deserve to see it.

In 2025, the Alice Murals and Friends Mural Series received a Special Recognition award from the NYC Public Design Commission at its 43rd Annual Awards for Excellence in Design, in recognition of the conservation and restoration work that has brought these historic panels back to public life.

WPA History

The story of New York City’s WPA hospital murals is on view now at the Museum of the City of New York. Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural, June 6 to September 20, 2026

A Century of Healing Walls: The WPA and the Origins of Our Collection

The roots of the NYC Health + Hospitals art collection reach back nearly a century, to one of the most ambitious public art programs in American history.

In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration commissioned thousands of murals for public buildings across the country as part of the New Deal, putting unemployed artists to work while investing in the civic and cultural life of American communities. New York City’s WPA office took a particular interest in hospitals, working proactively with the Department of Hospitals to identify opportunities. The result: murals commissioned for eighteen of the city’s public hospitals, totaling approximately sixty works across all five boroughs, more than anywhere else in the country.

The murals were designed not merely as decoration but as therapeutic interventions, intended to comfort frightened patients, inspire hospital staff, and connect communities to the institutions that served them. In this, the WPA muralists were giving form to a conviction that Florence Nightingale had articulated in 1860: that variety of form and brilliancy of color in the hospital environment are actual means of recovery.

Many of these works have been lost, destroyed when the buildings that housed them were demolished or converted. What remains is remarkable. NYC Health + Hospitals stewards a significant collection of surviving WPA-era murals, among them Charles Alston’s Magic and Medicine and Modern Medicine at NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem, William Palmer’s Development of Medicine at NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst, and Ilya Bolotowsky’s abstract murals at NYC Health + Hospitals/Lincoln. These works, restored and conserved through decades of sustained effort by Arts in Medicine, remain accessible to the public in the hospitals where they were made.

Among the most celebrated of the surviving works is Abram Champanier’s Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York, a sixteen-panel mural cycle created for the children’s ward at Gouverneur Hospital between 1938 and 1940. After the hospital’s closure and demolition, the panels were rescued and underwent a decades-long conservation process. In June 2026, in collaboration with the Museum of the City of New York, they go on public view together for the first time in nearly fifty years. The full history of New York City’s WPA hospital murals, from the first commissions at Kings County Hospital in 1932 through the extraordinary body of work created across all five boroughs during the Depression era, is documented in the essay A Century of Murals by Rick Luftglass, Executive Director of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, to be published in Healing Walls II: NYC Health + Hospitals Community Mural Project (forthcoming, 2027).

Explore Another Wonderland at the Museum of the City of New York