Museums as Medicine? The Growing Trend of Art Prescriptions

Art has long been used as an aesthetic aid in hospitals and healthcare facilities, and art therapy has existed since the mid-20th Century. But the practice of prescribing art and cultural activities by providers in clinical settings has spread in recent years under the umbrella of social prescribing—wherein healthcare professionals refer patients to non-medical supports and services, which can include engaging with the arts through exhibition visits, classes and cultural programs.

In Massachusetts, the government organization Mass Cultural Council recently created the nation’s first statewide arts prescription program connecting hospitals and primary care providers to 300+ arts and cultural organizations following their successful pilot in 2021. That original pilot inspired an artsRx program in New Jersey, where a first-of-its-kind partnership between New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) and insurer Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield covers up to six months of members’ arts prescriptions. At New York City Health and Hospitals, the nation’s largest municipal healthcare delivery system, both health workers and patients can participate in various arts activities, including painting, jewelry making, photography, creative writing, and botanical printing. As the concept spreads, companies like Art Pharmacy are working to integrate art prescriptions into more managed care plans nationwide, including a program for students at Stanford University.

The idea of prescribing art as medicine follows a growing body of research linking arts engagement to significant improvements in individual and population health. A landmark review of over three thousand studies concluded art played “a major role in the prevention of ill health… and management and treatment of illness across the lifespan.” According to EpiArts Lab, a collaboration between the University of Florida Center for Arts and Medicine (UFCAM) and University College London (UCL), the arts can—among other benefits—help reduce stress and loneliness, increase physical activity and social cohesion and boost happiness and wellbeing.

The UFCAM framework suggests art is medicinal through several mechanisms, like how art promotes empathy, facilitates meaning-making, and encourages self-expression and self-efficacy. Their research suggests arts and cultural engagement can be used to help treat symptoms of several conditions, including Parkinson’s, chronic pain, depression and addiction. To act on that potential, UFCAM—in collaboration with Mass Cultural Council and arts and health expert Dr. Tasha Golden—created a field guide for health and social care systems looking to integrate arts and culture prescriptions into programming.

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The guide points out that social prescribing has been more systematically integrated in the United Kingdom, where healthcare is nationalized. A recent U.K. government report found that engaging with the arts generates £8 billion worth of improvements in people’s quality of life each year, and other research on social prescribing suggests that it can save money by reducing pressure on healthcare. The United States, meanwhile, has a different set-up and different cultural attitudes toward healthcare.

“Here, we pay for healthcare, and we want to get our money’s worth, [and] if a doctor says, ‘I want you to take a dance class,’ the patient might say, ‘Oh please… this is not what I came here for,’” said Dr. Jill Sonke, the founding director of UFCAM, in The Connection Cure.

Still, Dr. Sonke believes cultural shifts in American healthcare are possible. She points to how doctors now recommend regular exercise in a way they didn’t seventy years ago and thinks a similar future could be in store for the arts.

In July 2024, Dr. Sonke helped lead Arts for Everybody—a one-day campaign supporting participatory art projects across eighteen cities and towns in the United States. Inspired by the Federal Theatre Project of 1936, when eighteen cities and towns premiered their interpretations of the same play on the same day, Arts for Everybody sought to create a national conversation on the role arts play in health and connection.

By many measures, they succeeded. Among the eighteen, Urban Health Plan—one of the largest federally qualified health center systems in New York State—recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to continue its arts-based social prescribing program at three community health centers in the South Bronx.

“I am excited for this opportunity to broaden our understanding of the many different ways arts participation can contribute to advancing this work while also demonstrating the power of cross-sector partnerships,” said Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, in a release announcing funding for eight other projects around the country, from Indiana to Minnesota. “Belonging and social connection are increasingly understood as vital to the health and well-being of both individuals and communities.”