Date: Tuesday, September 29, 2026
My name is Melinda Šefcic, PhD, and I am a visual artist, researcher, and educator from Croatia. For more than a decade, I have been developing and evaluating mural interventions in hospitals and prisons, exploring how art can contribute to wellbeing, dignity, and the human experience of institutional spaces.
When people ask me about evaluating art projects, they often assume that evaluation comes after the artwork. In my case, it was the opposite.
My artistic practice developed alongside research. My first hospital interventions were part of a doctoral research programme examining how artistic interventions influence the experience of hospital space. Before painting a single mural, I studied environmental psychology, healthcare design, Arts & Health research, positive distraction theory, biophilic design, and evidence-based approaches to healing environments.
I wanted to understand whether art could contribute to the rehumanization of institutional environments and how patients, families, and healthcare staff experienced those changes. Evaluation therefore became a core part of the methodology rather than a final reporting requirement.
What began in hospitals gradually evolved into a transferable research-based model. The same combination of artistic intervention, pre-intervention assessment, and mixed-method evaluation was later applied in correctional environments, allowing comparison across two very different institutional settings. Over the last decade, I have developed, implemented, and evaluated more than 300 murals and artistic interventions across hospitals and prisons, combining questionnaires, interviews, participatory observation, participant feedback, and comparative analysis.
One lesson became clear very early: evaluating art requires looking beyond aesthetics. A mural can be visually successful and still fail to connect with the people who use the space every day. Its real value emerges through human interaction.
In hospitals, murals often function as positive distractions. Children invent stories about painted animals, parents use the imagery to reduce anxiety, and healthcare staff use visual elements as communication tools. Research findings demonstrated improvements in comfort, atmosphere, and the overall experience of the hospital environment. In prisons, participants described murals as creating a greater sense of dignity, comfort, and emotional relief. The walls became platforms for participation, dialogue, and reflection rather than simply surfaces to be decorated. Both inmates and staff reported positive changes in atmosphere and reduced stress.
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