Anne Labovitz

Multimedia artist Anne Labovitz believes we have a mental health crisis in this country, and it’s fueled her to explore the connection between art and health. She studied psychology at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and has spent the past 30 years collaborating with hospitals to create art installations and public speaking engagements on art and wellbeing. She paints abstracted forms on a variety of media—from Tyvek to canvas—exploring “the human psychological condition and finding ways to … connect with people and bring people together in different ways through art,” she says. When the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota, asked her to create a solo exhibition dedicated to health-care workers, Labovitz did not hesitate. The show, Convergence: Health and Creativity, ran from November 2024 to this past July; one installation now hangs permanently in the museum’s atrium.

For the exhibition, Labovitz commuted from her home in Minneapolis to Fargo to interview over 50 health care workers. She asked them how they incorporate creativity in their careers, and “it was wonderful just to hear the level of commitment to their patients and passion for doing excellent work,” she says. Many said they were inspired to work in the field, specifically in mental health care, because they wanted to be the person they themselves had needed when they were a kid. Other conversations delved into the interviewees’ traumatic pasts in ways that were cathartic for both them and Labovitz. “When I hear someone’s vulnerability, I know I’m alive,” she says, the interviews reminding her of our shared humanity. “That is, for me, really powerful and palpable.” After completing the interviews, Labovitz incorporated phrases from them into smaller works, such as her paper-based Word Works, or large-scale color field paintings on Tyvek, the blooming hues meant to represent the emotional tenor of the interviews. “I’m quite interested in the idea of how something really personal and intimate, like a one-on-one interview, can then become something monumental and be a part of something that’s 80 feet by 40 feet,” Labovitz says. She also invited viewers to participate by writing their answers to the prompt, “What does well-being mean to you?” on painted squares, then hanging them on the wall. The responses filled about 10,000 pieces of paper. Visitors would come up to three times a week to see what others had written, “because they’re messages of hope in a way,” Labovitz says, underscoring that everyone was “being a human and noticing, pausing, and noticing some other human.”

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