Artwork Detail

The Recuperative Care Center (RCC) at the Martin Luther King Medical Campus in Willowbrook, CA provides interim housing to help stabilize homeless patients who would otherwise remain in the hospital without a suitable discharge option. With a targeted average length of stay of four to six weeks, the RCC program supports 900 to 1,400 patients per year. Clients have access to a range of support services to assist them in achieving independence and ultimately prepare them to move into permanent supportive housing. Through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission’s Civic Art Program, artist Sandy Rodriguez loaned 26 artworks for display in the facility. The paintings, a series of expressive watercolor and oil landscapes, were created with foster youth at community art space Art + Practice in Leimert Park, and with residents in the View Park/Windsor Hills neighborhood through a civic art project called Some Place Chronicles. The project at the RCC continued her interest in engaging the people and communities of South Los Angeles. For phase 2: Artist-in- Residence Program Rodriguez developed a program for clients at the RCC who created artworks to replace those currently on loan from the artist. Participants saw, felt, smelled, touched, and in some cases, tasted organic colorants and pigments in various states, and ground plants and insects into pigments in a mortar and pestle. Once the materials were processed, participants added ingredients required to make paint (as painters across the world have done up until the 19th Century). Sandy shared about each material and introduced historical information for fifteen to twenty minutes at every session. Selected patient and participant artworks are framed and installed in the Center. This project won the 2017 American for the Arts, Public Art Network Year In Review Award Winner. At the project's end six banners were acquired; digital prints of the artist's original watercolors.