Art that Comforts and Helps Heal

For Emmy, a teenager, art is both medicine and a passion. She first turned to it to cope with a painful allergy to the insulin she took for her type 1 diabetes.

Emmy paints stained-glass panels, draws comic strips about pets baking cookies and sculpts creatures from clay. She also comforts others with her talents. She made memorial art for grieving families and pet portraits for hospital staff when she was in intensive care in Minnesota, following a pancreas transplant. Her artwork is on display in our Young Expressions Gallery.

Her family moved to Maryland to be near Children’s National, a place they believed could better handle her complex care. Emmy is doing well. She doesn’t need insulin injections anymore, but she still needs her art. She hopes her creative works help other patients heal, too.