Another Wonderland Reunites Historic WPA Hospital Murals

The Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund is a lead supporter of Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Murals, on view at the Museum of the City of New York through October 12. The exhibition reunites, for the first time in nearly fifty years, Abram Champanier’s remarkable Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York mural cycle, created between 1938 and 1940 for the children’s ward at Gouverneur Hospital.

Commissioned through the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the sixteen-panel mural reimagines Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in 1930s New York City. Alice and her companions explore the city’s landmarks—from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty to Coney Island and the Central Park Zoo—bringing imagination and a distinctly New York sense of adventure into a public hospital.

The exhibition reflects the Illumination Fund’s longstanding commitment to expanding access to the arts in healthcare settings. Since launching its Arts in Health initiative in 2018, the Fund has partnered with NYC Health + Hospitals to support arts programming across the public hospital system, including the Arts in Medicine department and the Community Mural Project, which has brought more than fifty contemporary murals into hospitals throughout New York City.

The exhibition also reflects the Fund’s longstanding interest in the history of art in New York City’s public hospitals. While researching and publishing Healing Walls: New York City Community Mural Project, the Fund explored the legacy of Works Progress Administration murals created for the city’s municipal hospitals, deepening its interest in Champanier’s extraordinary mural cycle and the remarkable story of its rescue and restoration.

Following the closure of Gouverneur Hospital, the murals narrowly escaped destruction when conservators Alan and Denise Farancz rescued them in 1981. After decades of painstaking conservation, the complete mural cycle is now on public view for the first time in nearly fifty years. When the exhibition closes, the restored murals will return to NYC Health + Hospitals/Gouverneur, where they will once again be displayed in a children’s setting, reconnecting the artwork with the purpose for which it was originally created.

The exhibition, curated by Lilly Tuttle, was organized by the Museum of the City of New York in collaboration with NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund.

To learn more about the exhibition, read Hilarie M. Sheets’ feature in The New York Times.

Watch the NY1 News feature, which includes interviews with Laurie Tisch, Rick Luftglass, curator Lilly Tuttle, and Larissa Trinder, head of Arts in Medicine at NYC Health + Hospitals.

Visit Another Wonderland at the Museum of the City of New York.