Art reduces stress, lowers pain perception, and improves mood in hospital patients - a pattern replicated across five decades of independent clinical research. Story deepens that effect: knowing who made a work, and why, changes not just what a patient thinks about what they're seeing, but how they see it. 

Together, art and story create a genuine human connection at exactly the moment a patient needs it most.

Active Art is designed to deliver this connection, this moment of patient wellness, in healthcare settings. 

It began with Jonathan, our co-founder and Artist in Residence at MGH, sketching in a hospital waiting room while his father was treated for cancer. Nurses taped his drawings to the walls. His father died four months later, but the drawing never stopped. What started as one man's way of staying positive and present for his family became a way of bringing that same impact to every patient who pauses in front of our paintings.

Active Art is a painting on a wall, made by a real person, with a story attached. Each work is registered in the Active Art app; when a patient points their phone at the canvas, the app recognizes it and a short video plays - the artist describing why they made it, the memory it holds, the feeling they were reaching for. 

And that moment of connection now carries real financial weight. Patient experience is 25% of a hospital's Value-Based Purchasing score, and a single percentile of improvement can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional annual reimbursement. 

For six years now, between 30 and 40 of Jonathan's paintings have been living at Massachusetts General Hospital and have now been joing with a Boston Bruins Foundation mural in pediatric oncology. 

Art is a Verb, and as MGH said ''The bad news room became the good news room."

Active Art LLC

Org chart

Teams

Offices

Active Art LLC

Org chart

Teams

Offices

Related companies