About our project
May 2013 Update
This was our first project, a fantastic success that helped us start the #Cinderblocks conference in Kansas City. Thank You So Much!
Now we are doing it again to make a movie! Please join us in this mission to and get some great rewards AND a tax deduction! Find and fund us here.
What is The Walking Gallery?
Paint and patients, pills and policy all come together within The Walking Gallery of Healthcare. This walking wall of individuals who wear personal patient narrative paintings on their backs is changing minds and opening hearts. They are attending medical conferences where often there isn’t a patient speaker on the dais or in the audience. They are providing a patient voice, and by doing so, are changing the conversation. While creating national health policy medical professionals and government officials are often more reliant on aggregate data sets, bar charts, graphs and statistics, rather than the whole picture of care, the personal patient narrative and the individual human face.
The Walking Gallery movement hopes to diversify the source content that is used to create the foundation for patient centered care policy, by infusing art imagery depicting a unique patient history or personal story.
An artist or artists will interview medical professionals and lay individuals to form a patient-centric narrative. The artist will then create representational imagery and paint that picture story upon the business jacket of the provider of the narrative account. The provider of the patient story aka “Walker” will wear the jacket to medical conferences and events in order to disseminate the patient story to a large group of policy minded attendees and to represent the individual patient voice in venues where they are underrepresented. Further, both artist and walker will support the spread of the story and image via social media.
As of July 2012, 155 unique Walkers have joined the Gallery wearing 170 jackets. The Gallery has representatives on five continents, but the majority of Walkers reside in the US. One artist creates the majority of the art, but new artists are joining and currently make up 14% of content creation within of the Walking Gallery. The Gallery is promoted heavily on twitter, facebook and personal blogs. Its widening appeal within the health conference community is creating a new space for patients at such events.
We will be gathering the Partnership with Patients Summit in Kansas City on September 21st, 2012. We need to raise $5,000 by September 14th, 2012 to fund the gathering and increase awareness of this truly ‘mobile’ patient advocacy movement.
Why do we need the Walking Gallery?
A picture is worth a thousand words. This movement is changing hearts and minds.
When walkers wear their jackets they wear the patient story in on their backs. They self-define as patient, no matter what professional title they have attained. The gallery has imagery that explains the importance of open clinical data to the pharmaceutical industry. There are pictures that explain the importance of patient electronic medical record access to institutions. WiFi access within hospice care is addressed through the painted image.
The walking gallery has imagery that is addressing solutions and concerns throughout the world of medicine. Every image is posted with a creative commons license. So whether the image spreads the word on someone’s back or via the tools of technology, each day that passes this movement is reaching an ever greater demographic in this space.
This is not just a feel good art project. This is communication through image; it is a powerful tool that has served mankind for 30,000 years. Help us spread it even farther.
How does The Walking Gallery Help Patients?
We are the Gallery that walks. We are the Patients that wear our stories on our backs. Soon we we shall to come to a city near you and and create gallery space in moments. We won’t pound a single nail into the walls to hold the art. Dozens of people will walk into a space wearing business jackets or doctor’s lab coats. That alone is not unusual. But these jackets will be works of art. Each one shall be painted with the story of a patient or an element of medical advocacy by me or another artist. These masterpieces will be worn on the backs of patients, government employees, technology gurus, medical professionals, social media activists, CEO’s of companies and artists. It shall be a great meeting of the minds. Each can embrace themselves as they patient that they are and redefine this space through that experience.
How does The Walking Gallery help Providers, Medical Device, Pharmaceutical, Insurance companies, Government, and other large organizations that want to help drive innovation?
Perhaps you will have the honor to wear one of these creations. It can be quite unsettling. People will stop and stare. You can now enter a conference and feel like an outsider. Ostracized. You can be given the gift of experiencing the disconnected feelings of the ignored patient in the room. People will point and talk about your back like you are not even there. You are a “case,” an object, you exist to be described and critiqued. And after being at a conference all day, you can take that jacket off, and be normal again. Or not. You can “come out.” You can let go of that other title, be it, Techie, Doctor, CEO or founder of a non-profit. You can cease to be defined as the cog you appear to be in the machine called medicine. You can be simply patient. You can tell your personal story and reach your inner center as a patient.
Perhaps my painting will help you. Perhaps it will be the icebreaker you need to let go of the ubiquitous black suit that blends in at a medical conference. Perhaps it will be way to open up about why we are doing all of this important work. We are doing this to help patients heal. We are doing this so we can all live happier lives.
How will we spend your investment?
Our goal is to raise $5,000. These funds will be used to promote the Walking Gallery to an ever broader audience, pay supplies, travel to events in order to represent the patient voice and cover the overhead for our in-person gathering in Kansas City on September 21, 20012.
Who is on your team?
I am Regina Holliday, founding artist, I am patient/caregiver artist and speaker who has presented at HHS on the patient voice with Meaningful Use and received honorable mention for submission of artwork based comparing clinical data sets with HCAHPs scores for the Community Health Data Initiative. My patient advocacy artwork has appeared in the BMJ and APA publications.
The Artists of The Walking Gallery vary in age from 5 years old to over 40 years of age.
1. Regina Holliday 147 jackets
2. Isaac Holliday 6 yrs, 1 jacket
3. Becca Price, 1 jacket
4. Miriam Cutelis, 1 jacket
5. Ess Lipczenko, 1 jacket
6. Ben Merrion 1 jacket
7. Courtney Mazza 4 jackets
8. Michele Banks 1 jacket
9. Megan Mitchell 15 yrs 1 jacket
10. Robert J. Filley 3 jackets
11. Anita Samarth 1 jacket
12. Mary Welch Higgins 2 jackets
13. Richard Sachs 1 jacket
14. Jonah Daniel 5yrs 1 jacket
15. Fred Trotter 1 jacket
16. Leela 7yrs 1 jacket
How does one join The Walking Gallery?
What you need to do to be a member:
Promise that you will wear this jacket to other conferences and events in order to spread awareness of the power of the Patient Voice.
Send a business jacket so I can paint your image. Please do not send jackets made of seersucker, corduroy, knit, denim, leather or stretch fabric, as they are hard to paint on. Also this is a business jacket on purpose, we are painting on the “uniform” of the conference attendee. Fabrics that work well are poly-blends, linen, cotton and wool. Also you might want to by a jacket a size larger than you usually do as the painting will stiffen the back and make it harder to close the buttons.
Tell me your patient story or another’s you wish to depict please send via email with some pictures if possible of yourself or the people in your story. If you don’t want to provide a picture, that’s okay, I have a vivid imagination.
Artists can participate by painting their own jacket or another’s or both.
I am using Twitter hash tag to link us all together so please tweet about your jacket appearances under #TheWalkingGallery we also have a page on Facebook: facebook.com/TheWalkingGalleryHC
You are free to use the image in your own advocacy mission; I also retain the right to reproduce the image for advocacy purposes.
Donations and investments are welcome to offset the cost of paint, shipping and promotion, but are not required. You cannot buy a jacket. You are joining a movement, and this is a sacred oath to walk the walk and spread the word.
Where are you?
I am located in Washington, DC, USA.
Why am I doing this on MedStartr?
Do you know what some people call gallery jackets? Super-hero capes. We thought to strip our stories bare and walk with in this world vulnerable and transparent. Some may have thought that would weaken us, some may have thought us small; but now we walk into a space with a badge of courage. Why do you think social media works as well as it does? In this new world of open communication, brutal truth is prized above all else. We walk and testify. We walk and act. We do not wait for permission. We know every day some family is suffering because they cannot find a doctor they can afford. We know a wife is trying to research a disease online before it is too late for her husband. We know there are parents fighting for their child’s access for palliative care while accessing curative treatment.
We know this and we know each other. There are 155 people wearing jackets in the gallery at this point. 155 people whose stories I tell when I attend conferences. 155 people who are networking and connecting an ever larger web. They are walking, they are talking and they are changing health policy. I support Medstartr because it is just as disruptive as The Walking Gallery itself.
We are all patients in the end. Embrace your story. Join us and demand change.
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Have a question?
If the info above does not help, you can ask the project creator directly.
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