Best Medicine: Uplifting

N.Y.U. Langone Hospital commissioned a three-story-tall plexiglass sculpture of a Dalmatian balancing a yellow taxi on its nose. A branch of NewYork-Presbyterian recently bought around three hundred blue-chip art works, including a Kehinde Wiley painting. Executives at Northwell Health, the state’s largest health-care provider, realized that the drab landscapes and still-lifes of flowers adorning its waiting rooms weren’t cutting it anymore. Northwell’s problem was solved not long ago when it received an unprecedented loan from a wealthy Houston couple, Sandi and Bill Nicholson: four hundred and four paintings and sculptures composing a never-before-exhibited collection of women artists, spanning twenty-five hundred years and seven continents. “We lived with these girls for twenty years,” Sandi explained the other day, while touring Lenox Hill Hospital, on the Upper East Side. Twelve of the works…