How the Vancouver Art Gallery Is Turning Art Into a Prescription for Wellbeing

By partnering with Canada’s national nature prescription programme, the Vancouver Art Gallery has created something genuinely new: a social prescribing initiative that brings art, nature, and community care together under one roof.

There’s a thought that many people have standing in front of a painting that moves them — that this, somehow, is good for you. The Vancouver Art Gallery has decided to take that thought seriously, and to build institutional structures around it. The result is the Art of Wellbeing Lab: an evolving initiative that is repositioning the gallery as an active participant in public health, not merely a passive backdrop to it.

A Response to Place

The Art of Wellbeing Lab didn’t begin with a programme design. It began with a question: what does it mean to genuinely respond to the place you’re in?

For Sirish Rao, the gallery’s interim co-CEO and Director of the Art of Wellbeing Lab, that question demanded attention to everything that makes Vancouver what it is — its indigenous history, its Pacific Rim identity, its extraordinary proximity to nature. The city sits minutes from old-growth forest, coastal mountains, and the ocean. Nature, as the gallery’s Lead Wellbeing Consultant Paula Toledo puts it, is both a way of life for British Columbians and a core dimension of their health.

It also demanded honesty about what society needs. Mental health, Rao observes, is the widespread challenge of our times. And the gallery — a place of gathering, a place of belonging, with nearly a century of presence in the city — seemed well placed to offer a meaningful response. The question was how.

A Personal Foundation

Part of the answer came from Paula Toledo’s own experience. Sixteen years ago, during a period of acute personal loss — a newborn at home, a toddler, and a husband she had just lost — Toledo visited her doctor with a body that felt, as she describes it, seized up. The doctor referred her not to medication but to a community connector: someone who came to her home, asked what mattered to her, and helped her find her way back to the things that gave her life meaning.

She was encouraged to write music again and share it with her community. A volunteer came to the house so she could take movement classes. It was, she says, transformational — and it worked by tapping into something already present in her: self-efficacy, the belief that she had it in her to change her life. Seeing that outcome, for herself and her family, she went back to graduate school and began researching the role of arts and wonder in building pathways to wellbeing, with a particular focus on loneliness and social connection.

That lived experience of social prescribing — and the conviction that all Canadians should have access to it — became the personal foundation on which the Art of Wellbeing Lab was built.

The Prescription Programme

The lab’s flagship initiative is a partnership with PaRx, Canada’s national nature prescription programme, run by the BC Parks Foundation. PaRx had already established a model in which doctors could prescribe their patients visits to parks and natural spaces as a recognised health intervention. The Vancouver Art Gallery asked a simple but significant question: could an art gallery be part of that?

The collaboration that followed is, by any measure, unusual. Rao is unaware of another example anywhere in the world in which a nature prescription programme and an art institution have formally joined forces in this way. The programme launched on World Health Day — 7 April — and allows any doctor registered with PaRx to prescribe their patient a visit to the gallery’s Emily Carr exhibition. Each prescription covers the recipient and a guest, a detail that is deliberate: no one goes alone. Social connection is designed into the experience from the outset.

When prescribed visitors arrive, they are given a slow-looking guide and directed first to a welcome wall created by indigenous weavers from the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations — the host peoples of this land. From there, they move into the Emily Carr room, where prompts invite them to engage with all five senses, to notice how the painted landscapes make them feel, and to carry that attention into their relationship with nature beyond the gallery walls. The research underpinning the experience design — including work by Dr. Holli-Anne Passmore on noticing nature as a route to moral elevation and gratitude — is woven gently through the guide.

Building an Ecosystem

One of the clearest lessons to emerge from the programme’s development is that this kind of work cannot be done alone. Rao and Toledo spent considerable time mapping the strengths and connections available to them — medical associations, nature and conservation leaders, tech entrepreneurs, philanthropists, researchers — and hosting events designed not to present a finished vision but to listen.

From those conversations came key partnerships. Dr. Melissa Lem, co-founder of PaRx, was in the audience at one of those early events and became the programme’s central healthcare collaborator. Dave Richardson, founder of the Stigma-Free Society, became the donor whose support made the lab a reality. The gallery’s Elder in Residence, Skwetsimeltxw Willard (Buddy) Joseph, offered an indigenous perspective that reframed the whole enterprise: in indigenous thinking, the idea that art and healing are separate things is itself the anomaly. Of course art heals. Why else would you do it?

That perspective also challenged the gallery to think beyond its own institutional boundaries. Rao is candid that galleries and museums often expect the world to come to them. Building something like this requires the opposite impulse — stepping outside what is familiar, and actively bringing other worlds in.

More Than a Pilot

For Rao, the critical ambition is for this to become genuinely embedded in the way the gallery operates — not a marginal pilot project, but a core institutional commitment. That requires buy-in at every level: curatorial teams ensuring the integrity of the experience, communications teams amplifying the work, development teams raising the funds to sustain it.

He frames the bigger question as one about the future of museums and galleries themselves. The trajectory, as he sees it, runs from temple to palace to public square — and now toward something more porous and interwoven with the communities they serve. The Art of Wellbeing Lab is one thread in that larger story, one proposed answer to the question of what a cultural institution owes the society that surrounds it.

The programme is already attracting interest from healthcare practitioners beyond the conventional medical system — physiotherapists, naturopaths, psychologists — who want to become prescribers and connect their patients to the indoor nature experience the gallery offers. That expanding circle of belonging, Rao suggests, is itself part of the point.

Sirish Rao and Paula Toledo presented this work at the MuseumNext Museums & Wellness Summit 2026. Sirish Rao is interim co-CEO and Director of the Art of Wellbeing Lab at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Paula Toledo is founder of Ode to Wonder and the gallery’s Lead Wellbeing Consultant.