The Waiting Room
Where science, community, and art take form
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The Project Overview
Simone Leigh's The Waiting Room was an exhibition at the New Museum in New York City that offered free health care services to Black women. The exhibition was a tribute to Esmin Elizabeth Green, who died in the waiting room of a Brooklyn hospital in 2008.
The exhibition offered an alternative vision of the US healthcare system. It presented a model for spiritual and physical wellbeing. It honored Black women's bodies and their decisions about healing practices. It paid tribute to Green, whose story represents how Black women's pain is often overlooked.
What services were offered?
Free acupuncture and massage services
Workshops on herbalism, self-defense, and "Afrocentering"
Lectures on civil disobedience and aging
Health and wellness lectures
Who is Simone Leigh?
Leigh is a sculptor whose work explores the power of handmade objects to pass along knowledge.
Curators: Emily Mello | Shaun Leonardo | Johanna Burton
Related Public Programs:
Takeaways and Points of Inquiry
Sources
https://www.arteidolia.com/a-revolution-of-self-care-in-simone-leighs-waiting-room-erin-sweeny/
Editorial Note:
The Waiting Room was a project I read about early on in my academic career, and it inspired me to strive for space to impact people. By partnering with an institution and taking on a community initiative to serve a marginalized community, we see first-hand gaps in holistic medicine and wellness culture that aren’t taking a new drug, extreme regimens, or care coming too late for preventable diagnoses.
Medical racism can be investigated by J Marion Sims and his sinful treatment of Black Women for the ‘sake’ of science and the reassessment of how we uphold his memory in medical advancement to not treating in 2025 because of unfounded bias stating that Black people experience pain differently or have an ulterior motive in seeking specialized or costly procedures to improve quality of life.
This also speaks to the recent news of the white doctor breaking the bones of newborns (black babies) in the NICU- yes, the place built to sustain the lives of babies that need a hospital stay for various medical and developmental reasons. <read here>
Very little has been gained through advocacy for self, those in our care, and those who may be our neighbors. This page believes that whole-care includes gender-affirming care and reproductive rights under the care and knowledge of medical professionals in the pursuit of health, wealth, and safety. The only changes in medicine I hope to see are advancement in shorter recovery times and curing diseases, not rolling back access to life-saving procedures, and improving the quality of life of people because of moral objections- church and state separated protect us from a lot of overreaching.
““The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.””