For most of my career, “strategy” meant one thing: keeping a spreadsheet of open RFQs and RFPs and applying to as many as I could possibly stretch my practice to fit. If a call for artists mentioned a plaza, a library, or a lobby, I applied. So did four hundred other artists. That’s just the going rate for a decent public commission right now, and not an exaggeration. The pool of open calls is small, the pool of artists chasing them is enormous, and even a strong submission is, more often than not, a coin flip decided by a jury you’ll never meet, for reasons you’ll never fully know.
As I have mentioned in my earlier articles, I got tired of playing a game whose odds I couldn’t move. So I stopped asking “what’s open right now?” and started asking a slower, harder question: where does my work actually belong? Where is it genuinely, structurally wanted by the kind of people who would seek it out themselves, rather than sifting it from four hundred submissions?
That question led me to a bit of research and then to RxArt, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that commissions contemporary artists and provides the artwork to pediatric hospitals and healthcare facilities at no cost to the institutions.
The Mural That Found Its Home
Swiss artist Nicholas Party1 is, by any conventional measure, a gallery artist. His color-saturated paintings and pastels have been shown at Hauser & Wirth, the Hirshhorn, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the traditional ladder of a successful contemporary career. And yet one of his most quietly remarkable projects has nothing to do with a gallery at all. In 2021, he painted a 207-foot mural, a lush and slightly uncanny forest, along a corridor at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the hallway patients are wheeled down on their way to surgery. The piece is called Trees for Children, and it exists because a nonprofit called RxArt exists to broker exactly this kind of match: contemporary artists whose visual language happens to be extraordinarily good at calming a frightened child, placed into hospital corridors, CT suites, and waiting rooms where that skill matters more than almost anywhere else.
What strikes me about this isn’t that a famous painter did a nice thing for sick kids, though he did. It’s that the fit is real. Party’s work, saturated, strange, faintly dreamlike, turns out to be unusually suited to softening a clinical, frightening space for a child. This is the second home for his work, one that a gallery or a museum wall could never quite offer, because a museum or a gallery space doesn’t need to calm someone about to go into an operating room, especially a child. RxArt2 has since done the same thing with dozens of other artists, each placed not just anywhere, but into the specific room where their particular visual instincts do something a hospital administration could never think to commission on its own.
That’s the whole idea I want to walk through here. Every artist’s work has a room like that, a place where it isn’t merely tolerated or squeezed in through a competitive process, but where it is structurally, obviously wanted.
Finding it is a different kind of work from applying to open calls, and it’s the work I’ve actually spent the last year doing.
The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers. Below, I get into the mechanics of thinking about which world a piece of work belongs to, the questions to ask before even considering pursuing a project, and a simple template you can use this week to test your own work.
