How artists transformed a former hospital in Los Angeles to examine human emotions

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Just beyond an ambulance and wheelchair ramp wait Dr. Moodswing and Dr. Feelgood, dressed in starched white lab coats and ready to check you in with a neon orange patient wristband.

At this hospital though, it’s not your vitals that will be examined, but your feelings.

The “Hospital of Emotions” is an immersive art experience that explores different facets of being human inside the long-shuttered St. Vincent Medical Center near downtown Los Angeles.

The former hospital was founded in 1856 by the Daughters of Charity religious order to treat poor people before it went bankrupt in 2020 and was bought by private investors. The site will be redeveloped into a homeless shelter and mental health and drug treatment facility, with the first phase opening later this year.

But until the end of September, the hospital rooms are filled with 80 installations by 70 artists. Each artist received around $14,000 to transform four floors of clinical space into explorations of feelings around everything from medical and family trauma to grief over climate change and immigration detention centers.

Sterile hospital spaces are turned into colorful art installations

The project was created in the spirit of Meow Wolf and other for-profit amusement centers that approach art as entertainment.

As in Pixar’s “Inside Out,” color-coded creatures sprinkled throughout the show personify a range of emotions from joy and hope to anger and sadness. A fuzzy orange monster winks from behind a nurse’s station, while dueling green giants symbolizing jealousy face off in an otherwise normal exam room, their faces decorated with absurd, clownlike expressions.

IV bags are full of rainbow-colored liquids, overhead exam lights are festooned with a canopy of artificial flowers, and crutches are draped with campy, cartoonish wigs.

Enter the “Resilience Department” and you’ll find a prismatic, glass butterfly that refracts light, accompanied by an unsettling interactive audio piece about an artist’s experience having an epileptic seizure. The sound of grunts and labored breathing in headphones contrasts with screams, recorded and replayed in the room to create a surreal, out-of-body effect.

In the neighboring room, a thousand sunny-side up eggs are splayed all over the bed, walls and floor, which the artist, Melan Allen, said represent the eggs she was forced to eat during her childhood despite hating them. The room especially resonated with Sharon Maxwell, who drove from San Diego to see the show.

“I have lots of egg stories,” she said. “I’m in recovery from an eating disorder, so I’ve been in treatment, I’ve been in hospitals. It’s all very sterile.”

While going to the hospital can be an isolating experience, Maxwell said visiting an art show in one made her feel a renewed sense of connection. There aren’t nurses, surgeons or patients here, and everyone is on equal footing as viewers.

“Being the person in the bed, being treated for mental health stuff, you’re kind of like a spectacle,” she said.

A sensitive look at anxiety, fear and trauma

In the “Fear Department,” a virtual character based off a real person gives a vulnerable speech about post-traumatic stress from serving in a combat zone and then reads a suicide note that combines multiple veterans’ experiences using AI. The installation is titled “The Ward That Never Closed.”

Down the hall, another room is covered floor to ceiling in black-and-white portraits drawn with frenetic lines by an artist who spent 15 months at a U.S. immigration detention center.

“I left Russia in 2022 because of my political views and because I am gay. What I thought would be a search for safety became a prolonged encounter with fear,” Grisha Stepanian said.

His installation examines “how fear settles into the body, how it stays, even when there is no immediate danger. How safety, when it appears, feels temporary, almost unreal.”

The most successful rooms play with the visual language of a medical space without prescribing what to feel.

In another room in the “Fear Department,” artist Dongpu Ling created an eerie installation of transparent figurines — molded from packing tape — to bring a vision of her grandfather’s to life. He died years ago in Shanghai, where he described seeing ghosts around his hospital bed just before dying.

Torqued into myriad positions, the blank-faced figures occupy gurneys and disappear into institutional-gray ceiling vents. The work was also informed by Ling’s experience as a child spending 10 days in the hospital with a fever.

“I almost died. I couldn’t eat,” she said. “I threw up blood three times a night.”

The process of creating the installation was intense, Ling said. When she tried to go to her studio room and accidentally went to the basement, where bodies are typically stored before going to funeral homes, she said she found something chilling: “It was freezing cold and dead silent.”

Recognizing a paradox of emotions

Ondrea Boggs, an ultrasound tech, said the installations reminded her of people’s tenacity and resilience even in the face of death — something she witnessed working in an intensive care unit and emergency room.

“I’m confronted with people struggling every day and getting through and being strong,” she said.

Boggs is moved when she sees a patient or their family able to stay hopeful during a difficult time.

“It’s encouraging for me to remember that that’s possible,” she said. “Even amongst moments of sadness you can still experience joy, it’s not like an isolated experience where you have to get through the sadness to experience joy, right? Both can be shared at the same time and both can be honored.”

For other visitors, the installations also reflected that paradox of emotions.

“There’s solace in someone else seeing our emotion — whether it’s joy and celebration or sorrow and pain. There’s something about the human experience where we need to be seen,” Maxwell said. “This art exhibit really shows that in a profound way. I think it put humanity on display in a really powerful way.”

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Tickets cost $58, open through Sept. 30, 2026.