When Art is No Longer
Just a Pretty Picture:
Art for Advocacy and Social Change

A patient activist perspective by Regina Holliday
Art.
That’s for kids, right?
Writing
on the
Wall.
(or what one widow can
do with a borrowed ladder
an available wall and
$500.00 in paint.)
How can an outsider artist,
send a message to us all?

They can

Write it on a Wall.
Painting Advocacy

meets

Social Media

Street art is truly the first global art movement fueled by the Internet.
–Marc and Sara Schiller, Wooster Collective, 2010
“The aim of art is to represent not
the outward appearance of things,
but their inward significance.”
~Aristotle
This is the painting 73

cents.

This painting, like the internet,
advocates 24 hours a day
and you cannot tell a wall to shut up.
Next Steps: Why not paint open access hospital data sets…
…in front of said hospital?
Why not paint about the need
for better hygiene practices and
then enter that painting in an
online vote competition?
“blowing a gasket”

Sometimes
leads to the best kind of collaborative
disruption. Crowd-funding exists to make the impossible possible….
You

Patient Scholarships

can crowd fund in healthcare.
Where are the HOSPICE cards?
There is nothing between “Get Well” and “Sympathy”

Where are the faces

of the dying and those that love them?
#TweetChat
can change
the conversation.
#EOL
#Tedmed
#DWDchat
#hospice
#HospiceCards

Become a reality
The Walking Gallery
The more stickers that are out there the more important it seems.
The more important it seems, the more people want to know what it is.
The more they ask they ask each other.
It gains

real power from perceived power.-Shepard Fairey
We can redefine expectations of how we communicate
in medicine at every hospital, clinic and conference.
Let Patients Speak
We must encourage every committee,
conference and hospital board,
to actively recruit and include patients
in every aspect of the care process from
design to implementation to resolution.

Invite patients and you will include artists,
poets and writers in creating health policy.
Are you ready to jump?
Just a pretty picture

Just a pretty picture