Hospital of Emotions

August 9, 2026

On a recent trip to LA, I visited the Hospital of Emotions (@hospital.of.emotions) – an immersive pop up that utilizes 70 rooms of an abandoned hospital as a palette for artists to express various feelings.

Upon entering the queue, the patient (aka you) is given an admittance bracelet and asked to show their insurance card (aka your QR ticket for admission). Staff roam the hospital in scrubs.

The exhibit spans 4 floors and is designated by the following departments.

6^th floor – Resilience, Joy
5th floor – Sadness, Joy, Gratitude
4th floor – Hope, Compassion, Anger
3^rd floor – Love, Anger, Gift Store, Flower Shop, Reception

After visiting all the rooms on a given floor, you get to stamp your “Patient Emotional Chart” with a colorful discharge stamp.

I loved seeing the multitude of ways the artists chose to relay their emotion and found the explanations and context provided on the door placards particularly insightful. See the gallery of images below and the creator credits that follow. For a few of them, I including a line of description text which stuck with me even after exiting the exhibit.

Room 12, Joy Department, IV Bags, Yaara Sachs, @yaarasachs, “But joy does not belong to perfect situations…Even here – in a space built around uncertainty – color insists on breaking through. Joy is a state of mind.”

Room 09, Joy Department, “Pearls of Joy,” Heater Bellino, @heather_bellino

Room 17, Resilience Department, Flowers Blooming Out of Bed, Allison Reber, @allison.cre.ates

Room 51, Migration, Napo, @Napoleon.75

Room 62, Compassion Department, Jellyfish, Scene Shift Collective, @scene.shift

Room 57, Hope Department, “The Transfusion,” Michelle Lougee, @michellelougee

Room 29, Sadness Department, “Delivered,” Heriberto Gomes, @heri.artstudio: “This installation reflects on the emotional emptiness often hidden behind cycles of consumption.”

Room 26

I took the video below while visiting Room 26 designed by Dr. Maryam Trebeau (@almatreb @lxp_studios). The placard reads, “Through continuous line work drawn across the walls, ceiling, and floor, human figures of all identities emerge – stripped to their raw emotional essence, reminding us that sadness belongs to no single body or story. Raised, tactile lines form lifelines that carry a programmed pulse of light and sound, echoing a heart monitor – slow, deliberate, like breath, like waiting. The room exists first in darkness, where the work reveals itself only as the light travels line by line, inviting the viewer into an intimate encounter with emotion. Then comes the fracture – the pulse breaks, the sound expands, and the room floods with light, exposing every figure at once in a moment not of release, but of recognition. This space is not about treatments, but truth: a place where emotion is held, witnessed, and made visible.”

Each “department” also had a soundscape created by Almog Sachs @Zaltu_music which added a deeper sense of immersion to the art.

I had 4 favorite rooms: Room 56, Room 28, Room 50, and Room 75.

Come visit with me.

Room 56 – Toward the North Star

Hope Department, “Toward the North Star,” Dmitry Kemell, @lustre

This room made me cry.

It featured a hospital bed turned boat in the center of the room headed “across a turbulent sea toward an unknown destination.” On the sail a catalog of images was projected morphing a sterile “hospital room into a dreamlike odyssey.” A cinematic and soothing score played lightly in the background.

Next to the art placard was a letter written by the artist explaining how as a child growing up in the Soviet Union he remembered reciting Lermontov’s poem The Sail. On a summer holiday to Yalta by way of the Black Sea the artist’s father brought him to see an old schooner converted into a Pirate Ship. These formative memories led to a fascination with sailing vessels and their ability “to move beyond the shoreline, merge with the horizon, and seek unknown worlds.” The letter continues:

“There is something mythic in this fusion of transport and imagination – man and vessel confronting the elements together. A journey shaped by danger, endurance, and faith. To move with the wind, to yield to the waves, to face vastness with courage and uncertainty, to persevere though the storms that inevitably come our way. And whether by boat, plane, or train, my parents eventually brought my sister and me to this shore, to this side of the world, where they bought us a bunk bed that I would transform into a pirate ship through the powers of make-believe and a bit of creative intervention. My father was an engineer who marveled at the workings of the world and possessed a remarkable ability to ignite that same curiosity in me. He also suffered from cardiovascular disease and spent far too much time in hospitals. Yet he loved life deeply and endured greatly to remain connected to the light of this world.This piece is dedicated to him, and to the spirit of possibility he inspired: the belief that a bed can become a boat – a vessel capable for transforming how we see, feel, and experience reality, carrying us simultaneously toward the worlds once lived and those still to come.”

I cry again reading these words.

My father is also someone who has packed as many lifetimes as he could into one. A man who always billowed his sails and mine, and so as I stood teary eyed in front of that tribute I wonder what’s next in my own dad’s journey – a man who is nearing 88 with worsening dementia and now in a full-time care facility. I was/am overcome. I have to hope that the next part of his trip is as beautiful as the beauty I saw in those sails.

I cry again.

Room 28 – Time Eats It All

Sadness Department, Time Eats it All, Pablo Thomas, @_pablothomas

In the placard next to this door it explains how when people are close to death, their lives flash before their eyes not in a nice chronological sequence of events but as a flurry of moments. “This room exists inside that moment.” The text continues, “’Time Eats All’ represents a life being remembered as it disappears. Sad moments, happy moments, victories, failures, none of them are separate anymore.”

Certain images from this kaleidoscopic popped for me – the image of the feet on the beach, the monster expelling something from her throat, the close up of the closed eyes, the old time group photos, and the image of a dad holding a baby girl on his lap at a kitchen table.

I consider what images will come to me at my own end: Olivia twirling in a Belle dress, my mom and her sisters bikini clad – always the tops untied, skin glistening with tanning oil – on the Jersey Shore; my dad singing the songs from West Side Story into the video camera so he could ‘test the footage.’ Joe on bent knee with a ring-pop, carrying my 50 lb shepherd puppy home when he refused to finish a walk, sitting in a judge’s chamber as I was pronounced legally divorced, standing on top of chairs in a room wall papered in rainbows performing Madonna with my sister. A Garfield tent under the tree. A porch glider with my grandma. Buried in sand up to our necks. A finger trailed lovingly down my back. A helium balloon delivered to my fifth grade classroom that said Congrats and Christmas carolers at my door on a cold December night. A helicopter ride over the Napali Coast.

Room 50 – The Listening

Compassion Department, “The Listening,” Natalia Pavlova, @nataaliapavlova_xr

This room featured two sculptures jutting out from the walls on either side of the room: A big ear and a pair of lips. Visitors were invited via taped instructions in the hallway to walk over to the ear and listen to the secrets spoken into the room by previous guests while these messages simultaneously started scrolling on the center wall. The mouth – you guessed it – for telling your own tales to an empty room where never the less you are still heard.

Room 75 – The Ward that Never Closed

Fear Department, Paal Anand, @pa_fineart

This exhibit runs 3 short films on loop about the PTSD many of our veterans experience. I’ve included one of these below. The placard reads: “For many veterans living with PTSD, fear is not a single event but a room they never truly leave. The clinical spaces meant to heal become landscapes of re-experience – places where the mind replays its worst hours on an endless loop…This piece invites you to stand in the space that so many veterans inhabit silently – where fear is not a moment but a place, and the ghosts are not the dead but the living.”