Art, Empathy, and Healthcare Worker Wellbeing at the Whitney Museum

The Whitney Museum of American Art has built two distinctive partnerships with New York hospital systems — and the results are transforming how medical professionals relate to patients, colleagues, and themselves.

There’s a question that rarely gets asked in discussions about healthcare: who looks after the people doing the looking after? Since the pandemic, awareness of mental health provision for patients has grown significantly. But the wellbeing of the healthcare workers themselves — the nurses, surgeons, researchers, administrators, and students holding the system together — has often been an afterthought. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is trying to change that.

Two Partnerships, One Mission

Through two distinct programmes, the Whitney has built meaningful collaborations with major hospital organisations in New York City. The first is with NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest hospital network in New York, which provides free healthcare to every New Yorker. The second is with NYU Langone, through a programme called The Empathy Project.

Different in method, they share a common conviction: that art — closely looked at, openly discussed, and honestly responded to — can do things for healthcare professionals that conventional training cannot.

The Heart of Medicine Programme

The Whitney’s partnership with NYC Health + Hospitals operates through a programme called Heart of Medicine. Sessions are led jointly by an art therapist and a museum educator, pairing the therapeutic expertise of one with the object-centred facilitation of the other.

A typical 75-minute session begins with close observation of an artwork from the Health + Hospitals collection — often one with connections to works held at the Whitney itself — before moving through breathing and movement exercises, creative writing, and roughly 30 minutes of hands-on artmaking. The sessions take place both at the museum and directly at hospitals across New York’s boroughs.

Sharon Itkoff Nacache, the licenced creative arts therapist who co-facilitates the sessions alongside artist and educator Camilo Godoy, describes what makes this combination work: “Watching Camilo come alive — that’s one of my favourite parts of this. The artists really inspire you. And I learn something each session. So we really co-create a new space every time.”

The results are sometimes unexpected. In one recent workshop — inspired by the WPA mosaics of Jack Lubin at a Harlem hospital — staff were invited to create pieces reflecting their own “hidden gems.” One participant, whose mother had died nine months earlier, found herself making a picture frame bordered with gemstones. “I didn’t even know I needed to make this,” she told the facilitators afterwards. “I didn’t know this was on my mind.” She hadn’t planned to share it with the group. She didn’t need to. The space had given her what she needed without asking for anything in return.

Reported outcomes from the programme include deep relaxation, a stronger sense of positive environment, improved communication among colleagues, and a broadening of perspective — all tools that help staff navigate the burnout that has become one of the most serious consequences of working in an overstretched healthcare system.

The programme has also reached hospital leadership. When the executive team of Bellevue Hospital visited the Whitney to experience the programme for themselves, many had never given themselves the chance to look slowly at a work of art, draw observations, and share ideas with colleagues. They found they were benefiting too — and returned to a hospital that, like so many, has an art collection of its own.

The NYU Langone Empathy Project

The Whitney’s second partnership, with NYU Langone’s Empathy Project, has a different focus: building the capacity for empathy in medical professionals through close looking and structured dialogue.

It began with a striking gesture. First-year medical students at NYU Grossman School of Medicine now spend time at the Whitney in their very first week, before the clinical demands of their training have fully taken hold. In facilitated gallery conversations, they practise separating observation from interpretation — noticing when they’re jumping to a conclusion, attending to detail, and learning that the way one person sees a work of art is shaped entirely by their own experience and assumptions.

Dr. Jennifer Adams, Frankfort Director for the Centre of Empathy in Medicine at NYU Langone Health and an associate professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, describes why art works where conventional instruction often falls short. “When you have to teach medicine and you’re seeing a patient, it can become very complex,” she explains. “By using art, it levels the playing field. Everybody looks at a piece of art differently. No two people see anything the same way. Nobody can say, ‘I see it this way’ — well, that’s valid, but why do you see it that way? And when that happens, those brains start thinking, ‘Oh, I should be open to hearing things differently.’ Art allows this to happen in a very safe and creative way.”

After the initial sessions with students, other parts of NYU Langone began to take notice. Research departments, the OBGYN cancer unit, faculty and residents have all come to the Whitney to take part. Larger groups gather in a theatre or conference room, then break into smaller groups for intimate gallery conversations, before reconvening to reflect specifically on how the experience applies to their clinical practice.

The impact has been personal as well as professional. One participant told Dr. Adams that after hearing a colleague — with whom she’d previously struggled — speak with unexpected depth about a work of art, she found herself seeing and hearing that person in a completely new way. “I had a total new understanding of her and respect for her,” the student said. “And I saw her in such a different light.”

Ellen Tepfer, the Whitney’s Manager of Teaching Strategies, points to Jacob Lawrence’s War Series as an example of how the right artwork can open up layered, complex conversations. “It’s a little hard to make out exactly what’s going on,” she notes, which means it rewards the slow, sustained looking that visitors rarely give any work. Soldiers emerge from the background, a tank takes shape, a battlefield gradually reveals itself. The discussion that follows — about race, history, comradeship, and the tensions between wartime integration and postwar inequality — models the kind of careful, evidence-based interpretation that has direct application in diagnosis and patient care.

A Model Worth Watching

What the Whitney has built is not simply a wellbeing initiative. It’s a demonstration that museums have expertise — in facilitating dialogue, in creating space for self-reflection, in using objects to open up perspectives — that healthcare organisations genuinely need, and that can be delivered in ways that make a measurable difference to the people receiving it.

As Cris Scorza, the Helena Rubinstein Chair of Education at the Whitney, puts it: “People that care for each and every one of us when we need it also need care.”

The programmes have also fed back into the Whitney’s wider visitor engagement. Interdisciplinary sessions with healthcare professionals have shaped how the museum approaches intergenerational dialogues, conversations for younger adults, and mindful moments programmes for older visitors. In thinking more deeply about their role in community wellbeing, the staff have found that the work has enriched everything they do.

Cris Scorza and Ellen Tepfer presented this work at the Museum & Wellbeing Summit 2026. The Whitney Museum of American Art is located in New York City.