Behavioral Health · Art Advisory · Commission · Original Works · Large Scale

Skyway Behavioral Health | Downers Grove

This is the largest and most complex art program we have developed to date. Over 100 artworks selected, placed, and integrated across Skyway Behavioral Health's 25,000-square-foot Downers Grove facility. The art is never purely about decoration. At this scale, it becomes infrastructure. Every work was considered not just on its own terms but in relationship to the space where it would live, the people who would occupy that space, and the clinical purpose the room was designed to serve.

The guiding curatorial sensibility was grounded, mature, and assured. The overall tone is calm but strong and resilient, a distinction that matters in a behavioral health context. Many health spaces might achieve one or the other. This program was built to hold both. The goal was simple and ambitious: design an art program that guides people through the expansive space and makes it a healing place that an adult clientele wants to inhabit.

Original commissions anchor the main lobby and the Spravato lobby: a contemporary oil painting in two parts (diptych) that is a light, expressive nature abstraction, and a mixed-media wall piece featuring organic interlocking rings that shimmer as they traverse the wall, grounding the space with material presence. The sophisticated, warm minimalism that runs throughout the broader program finds its clearest expression here, setting a tone that carries through the entire facility.

Among the works that best capture the spirit of the program is a large-scale Joshua Tree photograph placed in an employee gathering space. Still and monumental, yet alive, it holds the room without overwhelming it and has become a natural backdrop for the social moments that happen in that space. It is exactly what art in a gathering space should do: create an atmosphere that brings people together.

The program is not uniform throughout, nor should it be. Different spaces serve different emotional purposes, and the art responds accordingly. The treatment corridors and shared clinical spaces carry the grounded, resilient tone of the program as a whole. The art therapy room and client break room offer pops of color and creativity that invite engagement and serve as a reminder that art has many functions and is never simply a backdrop. Knowing where to shift registers and where to hold the line is one of the most important aspects of curating at this scale. It is also what gives a program of this size its coherence.

Developed in collaboration with Epic Interiors. Photography: Cynthia Lynn Photography.