Behavioral Health · Art Advisory · Commission · Mixed Media

Insight Behavioral Health / Eating Recovery Center | 333 North Michigan, Chicago

By the time this program was developed, there was a clear curatorial arc across the three Insight Behavioral Health and Eating Recovery Center locations. Each one had asked the same essential question about who the people inside were and what they needed from the space around them. At 333 North Michigan, the answer was both: a population that spanned the youthful energy of the earlier programs and the sophisticated restraint of the more adult-centered work at 1 East Erie. The program needed to hold both registers at once.

The solution was the butterfly. As a visual metaphor for transformation, emergence, and becoming, the butterfly is so right for a behavioral health setting that it risks becoming sentimental in less careful hands. The curatorial decision here was to work it across a full spectrum from realistic to abstract, letting each person encounter it at whatever level of literalness felt right for them. Some people need the symbol named clearly. Others find more meaning when it dissolves into pure color and form. This program offered both, and the movement between the two became a kind of visual metaphor for the recovery process itself.

The lobby commissions are originals that I painted myself, constructed from collaged decorative paper, wood, and oil. The combination of materials gives the work a tactile richness and visual complexity that rewards sustained looking, which matters enormously in a space where people spend time sitting, waiting, and moving through difficult internal terrain. A butterfly cut-out shaped piece on wood adds dimension and a sense of playful intention that keeps the work from feeling heavy despite the weight of its subject.

The broader program combines bright color with grounded abstraction, meeting a mixed demographic with a visual language that is neither too youthful nor too restrained. The result is a space that feels alive with possibility, which is exactly what a program centered on transformation should feel like.

Developed in collaboration with Epic Interiors.