Joslyn art students bring light to Methodist Hospital garden

OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - Before colon cancer took Adam Koslosky in 2018, the Omaha Methodist Hospital board member and his wife dreamed of having a special place for patients to find peace.

In October 2020, the Adam M. Koslosky Reflection Garden became a reality.

“It is not a memorial garden, it is not about Adam’s death,” his wife Kathy said. “It is a reflection garden, it’s about you coming out here, I think it says on the sign, a place for sanctuary, a place for renewal.”

In the two years since opening, patients and their families, even exhausted doctors and staff have found their way to the garden. But Kathy said they had to walk down a path that was missing something.

“They’d come out the door and think they were on a loading dock and they weren’t in the right place,” she said of the gray concrete walkway from the hospital to the garden. “And we had this huge canvas of all this concrete and the idea was put forth for a mural.”

Enter the Joslyn Art Museum’s Kent Bellows Mentoring Program and artist mentor Hugo Zambrano, whose four young painters designed, and are now creating, a new passageway into the garden.

“The students were the ones that generated the ideas,” Zambrano said. “They all each drew different images and then we put them together.”

The mural sections will be connected by flowing, painted river and sky scenes, all painted with spray paint in exquisite detail, blending the different styles of the students.

“You can watch the styles go together and create something that’s even better.”

Millard North High School senior Sicily Manganaro has done some large form painting before, but this is her first experience painting a mural in a collaborative setting using spray paint. She said Zambrano talks to them about technique and detail, as well as purpose; this mural serves people who are seeking a respite from pain.

“When I think of a hospital, I kind of think of dreary, sad, gray walls, and I feel like this is just beautifying the whole thing,” the 17-year-old Manganaro said. “I mean the garden, when I walked over here, I was like, oh my gosh, so pretty, but now it’s even better, with this.”

“Just everything that happens in a hospital, knowing the background story of the garden itself, the road, and this gray wall, I think it helped them kind of see that everyone needs a bit of sunshine in a while, and so this is a great way to bring the sunshine in,” Zambrano said. He expects the work will be completed in the next few weeks.

“You can design something, but then to have somebody like Hugo do exactly what a mentor does, take and develop that into real life, is an astounding process to watch,” Kathy Koslosky said.

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