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Community Corner

Edsel Ford Graduate's Art Installation Spreads Hope to Sick Children

Matthew Lambert's vision of a mural created entirely by young patients at the Children's Hospital of Michigan provided an artistic outlet during a challenging time.

At the Children’s Hospital of Michigan, young patients are often facing frightening health issues. But this month, many of those children found an escape from illness, provided by 22-year-old Matthew Lambert, an alumnus of and the force behind the Communal Experience Project.

Made up of 132 small tiles individually painted by patients, a mural was installed Jan. 18 at the hospital by Lambert, with help from volunteers working for public arts project ArtCorps, and the hospital’s Healing Arts Program, which promotes well-being by using art.

For Lambert, the road to creating the mural began when he was looking for a service project at Wayne State University, where he’s majoring in both art and psychology.

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“I wanted to explore the idea of creating a collective work art out of smaller pieces,” said Lambert, who graduated from Edsel in 2007.

"The Communal Experience Project was a chance to allow the children to create something without restrictions. For a while, it was an opportunity for them to express themselves without having to think about why they are in the hospital.”

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To bring the project to life, patients were not given any specific directions, but were assigned a color. Lambert oversaw the young people as they and their parents painted the tiles, which were made of clay donated by Wayne State.

The final product depicts a human reaching for the sky.

“The real art is not the mural itself,” Lambert explained. “It’s art acting by transformative action. The mural is a bi-product of the experience, which will never end by virtue of its location and the people who might be inspired by it going forward.”

Arts Service Learning courses at Wayne are part of the community-based ArtCorps, which is modeled on the national Peace Corps, said Mame Jackson, a professor emerita of art history at Wayne that teaches the course, “Art in the Community: Art as a Social Process.”

“(ArtCorps) puts students and volunteers in different parts of the community in arts-related projects, (which) brings a vibrancy and vitality back to our community,” she said.

Lambert, who will graduate from Wayne this year with a double major of art and psychology, developed an interest in the arts when he was very young. Homeschooled until the sixth grade, Lambert said he learned most of what he knows about art from his mother.

At , his talents were further honed by art teacher Kate Blair, with whom he still corresponds. By the time Lambert started classes at Edsel, he was spending most of his time at taking psychology courses.

Now at WSU, Lambert focuses mainly on jewelry design, and is planning to work and study in Amsterdam later this year before heading to grad school.

But this month, it was all about working with kids. And while the children had fun creating art, Lambert knew it was about much more than that.

“Many of the children had visible signs of being ill,” he said. “That made this experience more important for them because it’s something that had nothing to do with their illness.”

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