Eddie Martinez, Untitled, 2021. Estimate $18,000 - 22,000. New Now New York.
Written by Diane Brown
Along with the RxART team, board of directors, collaborating artists, and hospital partners, I am extremely grateful to Eddie Martinez for donating such an exceptional work to help support RxART and to Phillips for providing us with this opportunity. The funds raised from the sale of this work will aid RxART’s projects in children’s hospitals around the country, which are produced at no cost to the hospitals. Our mission is to help children heal through the extraordinary power of visual art. RxART’s commissioned artists create powerful visual installations in what are typically challenging settings, providing inspiration and motivation to hundreds of thousands of young patients, their families, and the dedicated hospital staff who care for them.
Children's National Hospital in Washington, DC. Artwork © Jonas Wood, 2020. Photographer: Sean Shanahan Photography. Courtesy of the Artist and RxArt, New York.
The pandemic has created a challenging climate for RxART’s operations as it has for so many other nonprofit organizations. Since founding RxART almost 21 years ago, I have never witnessed a time that so earnestly calls for innovation, collaboration, and positive transformation. While our work was slowed down in the past year as our hospital partners battled COVID-19, I am proud that our team was able to safely produce projects with Jonas Wood and Takashi Murakami at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC and with Derrick Adams at NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem.
RxART Takashi Murakami Childrens National Hospital. Photography by Kenson Noel, 2020.
Another way we made sure the wonderful outlet of art reached more people was through the RxART coloring book, Between the Lines, which we produce every two years and donate to hospitals around the world. In 2020, we were able to donate nearly 4,500 copies of the coloring book—which Eddie Martinez has participated in—to local hospitals in the New York City Metropolitan area alone. The drawings in the coloring book offer a positive creative outlet to the young patients, their siblings, and even hospital staff. An ICU nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital shared copies of the book with her colleagues as the Coronavirus surged in NYC. One nurse shared a picture of her colored page, saying, “This letter alone took me 20 minutes and I’m immediately relaxed, thank you!”
Eddie Martinez, Untitled. © 2016 RxART Coloring Book V.6.
The positive and grateful feedback from our partner hospitals—sharing how the installations are bringing smiles to patients and parents, not to mention the hospital staff—makes it clear that RxART’s work is now more important than ever. We are working on ambitious new projects with Nina Chanel Abney for the Pediatric Ambulatory Clinic at NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst and with The Haas Brothers for the new lobby at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. Combined, those two projects will introduce welcoming and inspiring artwork to nearly 350,000 young patients each year. During a year that has seen emergency departments and waiting rooms dangerously full, our hospital partners truly could not be more thankful to have the positive distraction of uplifting artwork. Along with RxART’s collaborating artists, we feel a strong sense of pride and compassion knowing that their work will bring a smile and make a difference in the day of the children and frontline workers who experience their installations.
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