New Mural Brightens Drab Harbor-UCLA Pediatric Waiting Area

As usual, the pediatrics waiting room was standing-room only.

Mothers jiggled anxious infants. Toddlers ran across the floor. A baby howled. In all, more than 30 adults and children were awaiting medical attention.

It is a scene that repeats itself daily at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center pediatrics clinic, where people often wait an hour or more in what had been a nondescript room with long, tan-colored walls. But last week, the vista changed slightly.

A new mural occupies the wall above the crowded sofa. And some of the mural-makers--members of the Palos Verdes Junior Women’s Club--showed up for its dedication last Friday afternoon. The stylishly dressed women listened to a few speeches and sipped punch in the waiting room as young mothers and children watched, some looking mildly surprised.

The mural, made up of 16 canvas squares, depicts a butterfly’s metamorphosis amid a field of purple flowers. It was donated to the hospital by the women’s club and dedicated to the memory of the deceased daughter of a club member.

The outline of the design was first drawn in Georgia by Atlanta-based artist John Feight. He shipped the canvas panels to California, where club members painted them during a picnic last spring, with help from their families and friends.

They added the color according to Feight’s instructions, much as if they were executing an oversized paint-by-numbers game.

Feight, 50, traveled to the Harbor medical center for Friday’s dedication. “We are all care-givers in one way or another,” he told the assembled club members and patients.

Feight is the founder of the Foundation for Hospital Art, which he describes as a nonprofit group launched in 1984 to provide art for hospitals and nursing homes. So far, the foundation has provided more than 5,000 murals to more than 250 hospitals in 60 countries, he said.

Many of those murals were donated by community clubs and hospital auxiliaries. The Palos Verdes club, for instance, painted another Feight mural last year and donated it to San Pedro Peninsula Hospital.

Feight, who once worked in advertising, said he has made a mission of changing and softening the hospital environment. He carries with him a photo album of his work, including an elaborate mural of painted archways in a once-bleak hallway at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

“Art can become of some value if you put it where people need it the most,” he said. “What we’re talking about here is more than art. It’s an attempt to comfort and heal.”

People who are seriously ill or dying deserve to have beauty around them, he added. “We should have the opportunity to die in soft places.”

He motioned at the new, purple-flowered mural with its butterfly hanging above the roomful of waiting mothers and children.

“I want people to sit here and look up and begin to see a sequence there,” Feight said. “The butterfly may take them away from their pain a little bit.”