After a recent hospital visit, former gallery owner Diane Brown decided that the building’s bland art—breezy watercolor prints, “inspirational” landscape photographs—made her experience worse, not better. So she set out to change things, beginning with the walls. RxArt, the organization she founded, buys contemporary art and donates it to hospitals. Since its start in 2000, RxArt has brightened 10 hospitals with works from prominent artists, including a Dominik Lejman video installation of moving animals (now in a children’s hospital) and an abstract Robert Mangold painting (in the radiology department at Mount Sinai, in New York). “We don’t want to give them trees and a pond. We want something that’s challenging in a good way,” says Brown. “Something to think about other than illness.”