3 years. Thousands of medicine caps. Hundreds of hours and glue sticks. Boundless creativity and resilience.
Add it all together and you get a stunning art exhibition that showcases the Children’s Hospital Colorado team members’ resilience, environmental stewardship, teamwork and creativity. Back in 2018, their Resiliency and Wellness Teams started creating murals out of medicine caps used in patient care, which are now on display in the Frederic C. Hamilton Fine Art Gallery at their hospital in Aurora.
Teams across their organization joined in to create their individual murals. They saw yaks, geese, butterflies, landscapes, symbols, messages of gratitude and so much more come to life. And then the project took on a new life no one had planned.
Early on, teams could work on their murals together, in one place. Once the coronavirus pandemic started, that changed for several teams. So they split their murals into multiple sections, took medicine caps and glue guns home and then brought them back together to complete a wonderful display of creativity, ingenuity and resilience.
“As the pandemic forced people to be physically separated, this created a way for them to continue to collaborate and include more team members from multiple locations,” says Jasmine Chu, Arts Coordinator for Children’s Hospital Colorado.
The exhibit curators even created a mural entirely from COVID-19 vaccine caps thanking their team members. The winding road this exhibit took made the debut of these murals even more impactful for the teams who created them.
“When we were setting up the murals team members were walking by and excitedly looking for theirs and to see that ownership was great,” says Rachel Bernhardt, MPH, Wellness Coordinator, who helped create the exhibition. “They worked really hard on something awesome that gives people enjoyment.”
Visitors to the hospital in Aurora can enjoy these murals until August 25 and then they will permanently live in the departments that created them.
“Hopefully, people can get a feeling of respite from the art and feel inspired by the creativity of our staff,” says Chu. “They can get a feeling for the resilience of the patients, team members and families at Children’s Colorado.”
Author: Mile High Mamas
