The annual event celebrating art.
Slow Art Day is Saturday, April 5, 2025 Join Us!
Photo by Greg Neville
Innovating the Patient-Art Experience at St. Vincent’s Hospital
December 2nd, 2024St. Vincent’s Hospital, in Melbourne, Australia, is leading the way in coming up with innovative approaches to slow looking in a hospital environment. This year, they designed six “slow art cards” with photos of works from their St Vincent’s Art Collection – and on the back of each card they printed brief instructions guiding participants in looking slowly at the art featured on the front.
What a great way to bring art, and the art of slow looking, into all the corners of a hospital. We hope that many more hospitals around the world copy St. Vincent’s. Too often, the art in a hospital is not accessible to many patients. To that point, St. Vincent’s distributed the cards broadly to both staff and patients in Pain Management, Pastoral Care, Correctional Services and Palliative Care.
Below is the view of the back side of the card with the instructions:
Below are the front sides of the six cards. Note that the event organizers made sure that the art reflected the diversity of St. Vincent’s hospital community, which is why they included artists from a variety of backgrounds.
On loan to St Vincent’s Art Collection
St Vincent’s Art Collection
St Vincent’s Art Collection.
At Slow Art Day HQ we are really impressed with the creativity of the staff at St. Vincent’s Hospital. This is a great way to enhance the healing environment and support both patients and staff.
We look forward to many more hospitals around the world copying the ingenuity of the team at St. Vincent’s and can’t wait to see what they come up with for Slow Art Day 2025!
– JJ, Johanna, Ashley, and Phyl
Accessible Slow Art Day Hosted by the Art Gallery at Evergreen
November 30th, 2024For their third Slow Art Day, the Art Gallery at Evergreen in Coquitlam, Canada, invited visitors to look slowly at two artworks from their touring exhibition “Paths” for 5-10 minutes each:
- Silas Ng, Music in My Eyes, 2020.
- Sarah Anne Johnson, Woodland, 2020.
Both artworks were part of the 2024 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.
On the day, all visitors were invited to look slowly at one or both artworks using the below provided prompts. We encourage museum educators to take a look.
The activity was self-directed, but after doing individual slow looking, participants could discuss their experience with gallery assistant Kim Grewal, or were encouraged to share their reflections on Instagram. Before leaving, they were also invited to continue the slow looking experience by spending time with some of Evergreen’s public artworks, located only steps away from the gallery.
The exhibition “Paths” featured artwork by twenty-two Canadian artists, two of which were placed in focus for the Slow Art Day event. We’ll note that one of the featured artists, Silas Ng, is deaf, and explores this in his work. In fact, his featured work “Music in My Eyes,” 2020, encourages slow lookers to think creatively as they spend time with the art.
We look forward to seeing what Art Gallery Evergreen comes up with for Slow Art Day 2025.
– Johanna, Ashley, Jessica Jane, and Phyl
P.S. Stay up to date with events at Art Gallery Evergreen through their Instagram or Facebook.
Self-Guided Slow Art at the Cameron Art Museum
November 21st, 2024For their first Slow Art Day, the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, organized a self-guided viewing activity. They provided visitors with a flyer (shown below) which had a framework for participating and suggested artworks ranging from paintings to quilted art.
This is a great flyer/set of instructions. Other museums should feel free to copy anything they’ve done here.
We are glad to welcome the Cameron Art Museum to the Slow Art Day movement and look forward to what they come up with for 2025.
– JJ, Johanna, Ashley, and Phyl
ConnectArte.Gestalt at MACBA and La Virreina
November 17th, 2024For this year’s Slow Art Day, the project ConectArte.Gestalt hosted 2 events across the city of Barcelona, Spain – one at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) and the other at La Virreina. Both events had a Gestalt therapy approach and were led by Gestalt therapist and curator-producer Maribel
Perpiñá de Lama.
In this report, we’ll focus on the event at MACBA led by Perpiñá de Lama and focused on five artworks by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané from the exhibition “A leaf in the place of the eye”:
- Systemic Grid 126 (Window) (2015)
- La Pensée Férale (2020). These are seven photographs taken in the Tijuca National Park in Rio de Janeiro, one of the most biodiverse and endangered rainforests in the world.
- Breathing Lines (2020/2023)
- Landscape of Possibilities (2016/2023)
- Orange Oranges (2001)
The exhibition explores themes of impermanence, collective emotions, perception, fragility, time and space.
During the session, Perpiñá de Lama invited participants to slowly observe the artworks using nine principles from Claudio Naranjo‘s Gestalt approach:
- Live now, worry about the present.
- Live here, relate more to the present than what is absent.
- Stop imagining, experience what is real.
- Abandon unnecessary thoughts. Feel and observe instead.
- Express rather than manipulate, explain, justify or judge.
- Experience displeasure and pain as well as pleasure. Do not restrict your awareness.
- Do not accept any “should” or “would have” more than your own.
- Take full responsibility for your actions, feelings and thoughts.
- Accept yourself as you are.
The event was successful, and several participants left positive feedback:
“This workshop was a very eye-opening experience for me. I had never reflected so much on my own shadow and how it affects my daily life. The artwork really helped me to connect with aspects of myself that I normally avoid.”
“I was amazed at how powerful art can be in exploring how we are in the present moment. Seeing the images and then sharing my reflections with the group really made me feel more connected to myself and others.”
“This workshop made me realize how much we have internalized our shadow and how they influence our
decisions and relationships. It was a reminder of the importance of confronting those parts of ourselves in order to grow and heal.”
“The combination of the images in the exhibit and the group reflections was very impactful. I felt very
supported by the group to explore and openly share my thoughts and feelings.”
At Slow Art Day HQ we appreciate the innovative work ConnectArte.Gestalt and Maribel Perpiñá de Lama are doing and look forward to what they come up with for Slow Art Day 2025.
-Johanna, Ashley, Jessica Jane, and Phyl