Taking Heart: Artists on Healing, Health, and Care

The artists featured in the exhibition present themselves as more than patients. They become active partners in their own care, and they use art to understand their bodies, express their needs, and imagine what healing could look like in a world that puts people before their diagnoses.

What Visitors Will See

Healing, in this exhibition, doesn’t always mean a cure. Sometimes it means finding comfort, building strength, asking the right questions or simply feeling at home in one’s own body.

Nine contemporary artists living with disability and chronic illness take the settings and materials of hospital life and make them joyful, tender, and surprising. Dylan Mortimer transforms operating rooms into shimmering, jewel-toned scenes, where glitter and paint turn moments of fear into celebration. Dominic Quagliozzi builds monarch butterfly wings from hospital gowns, grippy socks, Mylar balloons, transforming the everyday materials of a hospital stay into a symbol of transcendence. Bhavna Mehta’s delicate embroidered paper cutouts render the heart and hands with care—and wonder.

Through drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, video, and community-based projects, the featured artists invite visitors to see health as a journey we all take.

Community at the Center

The exhibition also celebrates the role of community in health. Friends, family, caregivers, and medical teams all appear in these works, and so do the fellow artists who support one another.

Together, they remind us that caring for our health, caring for each other, is rarely something we do alone. Health care is a community effort.

The work challenges us to confront and redefine what we want care to be and what humanity and dignity we would like to preserve as we navigate that path.

Their work opens conversations about how we care for ourselves and one another, how we communicate with those who treat us, and how creativity can be a powerful part of well-being.

A Fit for Your Venue

Taking Heart is an invitation to slow down, look closely, and recognize the resilience, humor, and imagination that people, that we all, bring to each of our healing journeys.

Everyone who has sat in a waiting room will find something familiar here, and perhaps something encouraging, too. Taking Heart suits libraries, community galleries, university museums, and historical societies that want to open conversations about health, caregiving, and creativity.

Featured Artists

Ezra Benus, Riva Lehrer, Priyanka D’Souza, Carly Mandel, Bhavna Mehta, Dylan Mortimer, Dominic Quagliozzi, Katherine Sherwood, and Sunaura Taylor.

About the Curator

Amanda Cachia is a curator, author, and art historian focused on disability art and inclusive practices. She has curated approximately 50 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the United States, England, Australia, and Canada.

Cachia is currently a professor of practice in museum studies in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Cachia is the author of Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism (2025) and The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique (2024). She is also editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022), which includes over 40 international contributors.