Community coverage prepared for October 15, reviewed and published October 16, 2026.
Inside Maimonides Medical Center, a patient art exhibition is giving the word transformation a personal meaning. The work comes from members of an art-therapy group, bringing their creative expression into the Borough Park hospital’s lobby.
The exhibition, titled “Transformation: A Journey of Self-Determination and Grit,” was described in News 12 Brooklyn’s October 14 report. Its focus is not a single account of recovery, but the different meanings participants bring to their work.
Gloria Colon described faith as central to her painting and said the process helped her relax and express herself. George Spinella used a frog as a symbol of personal change. Their statements offer individual accounts of what participating means to them, rather than a clinical measurement of treatment outcomes.
Gwendolyn Kurtz, the hospital’s director of Creative Arts Therapy, told News 12 that art can help people explore experiences when verbal communication is difficult. The exhibit makes that idea visible: an image can communicate something its creator may not yet be ready to explain in a conversation.
Creative work is one part of the hospital’s broader approach. Maimonides lists dance, music and art therapies among its mental- and behavioral-health services, alongside other forms of care. Its adult outpatient offerings include group therapy, individual psychotherapy and medication management.
Those services should not be treated as interchangeable, and a person’s response to art does not establish that one approach will work for everyone. The exhibition is a presentation of patients’ work and experiences, not evidence that making a painting by itself cures a mental-health condition.
For Brooklyn neighbors, its value is also human: it introduces the people behind a hospital program through something they have chosen to create. News 12 reported that the display was planned for two weeks. Anyone intending to visit should confirm current access arrangements with the hospital rather than assume that a publicized exhibition overrides patient-care or visitor rules.
Information about care programs is available through Maimonides’ official website. The artwork offers a different kind of introduction—one built around expression, agency and the varied ways people describe change.