{"id":416442,"date":"2026-07-29T11:57:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T11:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/416442\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T11:57:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T11:57:11","slug":"how-artists-transformed-a-former-hospital-in-los-angeles-to-examine-human-emotions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/416442\/","title":{"rendered":"How artists transformed a former hospital in Los Angeles to examine human emotions"},"content":{"rendered":"

LOS ANGELES \u2013 Just beyond an ambulance and wheelchair ramp wait Dr. Moodswing and Dr. Feelgood, dressed in starched white lab coats and ready to check you in with a neon orange patient wristband.<\/p>\n

At this hospital though, it’s not your vitals that will be examined, but your feelings. <\/p>\n

The \u201cHospital of Emotions\u201d is an immersive art experience that explores different facets of being human inside the long-shuttered St. Vincent Medical Center near downtown Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

The former hospital was founded in 1856 by the Daughters of Charity religious order to treat poor people before it went bankrupt in 2020 and was bought by private investors. The site will be redeveloped into a homeless shelter and mental health and drug treatment facility, with the first phase opening later this year.<\/p>\n

But until the end of September, the hospital rooms are filled with 80 installations by 70 artists. Each artist received around $14,000 to transform four floors of clinical space into explorations of feelings around everything from medical and family trauma to grief over climate change and immigration detention centers.<\/p>\n

Sterile hospital spaces are turned into colorful art installations<\/p>\n

The project was created in the spirit of Meow Wolf<\/a> and other for-profit amusement centers that approach art as entertainment. <\/p>\n

As in Pixar’s \u201cInside Out,\u201d<\/a> color-coded creatures sprinkled throughout the show personify a range of emotions from joy and hope to anger and sadness. A fuzzy orange monster winks from behind a nurse\u2019s station, while dueling green giants symbolizing jealousy face off in an otherwise normal exam room, their faces decorated with absurd, clownlike expressions.<\/p>\n

IV bags are full of rainbow-colored liquids, overhead exam lights are festooned with a canopy of artificial flowers, and crutches are draped with campy, cartoonish wigs.<\/p>\n

Enter the \u201cResilience Department\u201d and you\u2019ll find a prismatic, glass butterfly that refracts light, accompanied by an unsettling interactive audio piece about an artist\u2019s experience having an epileptic seizure. The sound of grunts and labored breathing in headphones contrasts with screams, recorded and replayed in the room to create a surreal, out-of-body effect.<\/p>\n

In the neighboring room, a thousand sunny-side up eggs are splayed all over the bed, walls and floor, which the artist, Melan Allen, said represent the eggs she was forced to eat during her childhood despite hating them. The room especially resonated with Sharon Maxwell, who drove from San Diego to see the show. <\/p>\n

\u201cI have lots of egg stories,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m in recovery from an eating disorder, so I\u2019ve been in treatment, I\u2019ve been in hospitals. It\u2019s all very sterile.\u201d<\/p>\n

While going to the hospital can be an isolating experience, Maxwell said visiting an art show in one made her feel a renewed sense of connection. There aren’t nurses, surgeons or patients here, and everyone is on equal footing as viewers.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing the person in the bed, being treated for mental health stuff, you\u2019re kind of like a spectacle,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

A sensitive look at anxiety, fear and trauma<\/p>\n

In the \u201cFear Department,\u201d a virtual character based off a real person gives a vulnerable speech about post-traumatic stress from serving in a combat zone and then reads a suicide note that combines multiple veterans’ experiences<\/a> using AI. The installation is titled \u201cThe Ward That Never Closed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Down the hall, another room is covered floor to ceiling in black-and-white portraits drawn with frenetic lines by an artist who spent 15 months at a U.S. immigration detention center.<\/p>\n

\u201cI left Russia in 2022 because of my political views and because I am gay. What I thought would be a search for safety became a prolonged encounter with fear,\u201d Grisha Stepanian said.<\/p>\n

His installation examines \u201chow fear settles into the body, how it stays, even when there is no immediate danger. How safety, when it appears, feels temporary, almost unreal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most successful rooms play with the visual language of a medical space without prescribing what to feel.<\/p>\n

In another room in the \u201cFear Department,\u201d artist Dongpu Ling created an eerie installation of transparent figurines \u2014 molded from packing tape \u2014 to bring a vision of her grandfather’s to life. He died years ago in Shanghai, where he described seeing ghosts around his hospital bed just before dying.<\/p>\n

Torqued into myriad positions, the blank-faced figures occupy gurneys and disappear into institutional-gray ceiling vents. The work was also informed by Ling’s experience as a child spending 10 days in the hospital with a fever. <\/p>\n

\u201cI almost died. I couldn’t eat,\u201d she said. \u201cI threw up blood three times a night.\u201d <\/p>\n

The process of creating the installation was intense, Ling said. When she tried to go to her studio room and accidentally went to the basement, where bodies are typically stored before going to funeral homes, she said she found something chilling: \u201cIt was freezing cold and dead silent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recognizing a paradox of emotions<\/p>\n

Ondrea Boggs, an ultrasound tech, said the installations reminded her of people\u2019s tenacity and resilience even in the face of death \u2014 something she witnessed working in an intensive care unit and emergency room.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m confronted with people struggling every day and getting through and being strong,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Boggs is moved when she sees a patient or their family able to stay hopeful during a difficult time. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s encouraging for me to remember that that\u2019s possible,\u201d she said. \u201cEven amongst moments of sadness you can still experience joy, it\u2019s not like an isolated experience where you have to get through the sadness to experience joy, right? Both can be shared at the same time and both can be honored.\u201d<\/p>\n

For other visitors, the installations also reflected that paradox of emotions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s solace in someone else seeing our emotion \u2014 whether it\u2019s joy and celebration or sorrow and pain. There\u2019s something about the human experience where we need to be seen,\u201d Maxwell said. \u201cThis art exhibit really shows that in a profound way. I think it put humanity on display in a really powerful way.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Tickets cost $58, open through Sept. 30, 2026.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2013 Just beyond an ambulance and wheelchair ramp wait Dr. Moodswing and Dr. Feelgood, dressed in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":416443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[967,166605,48,52,51,971,47,50,49,17],"class_list":["post-416442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-entertainment","tag-grisha-stepanian","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-u-s-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}