H&E Healing Arts is a student‑founded, ceramics‑based arts and health initiative created by two second‑year medical students at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine in Oklahoma City. What began as a way to find calm and connection outside of clerkships quickly revealed itself as something more: a tangible, tactile medium that helped children, families, and care teams breathe a little easier in the middle of illness and uncertainty. From that realization, a structured program and now a nonprofit grew within the medical school.
.At its core, the project uses ceramics to create repeatable, relationship‑centered art experiences across hospital and community settings. Working with a local high school ceramics program, the student team hand‑throws standardized batches of white stoneware bowls and cups, bisque‑fires them, and then transports them to partner sites such as OU Children’s Hospital, PIVOT, SISU Youth Services, and the CARE Center. Patients and families choose glazes, look up color combinations, and experiment with techniques; when clinically appropriate, they also shape their own pinch pots from raw clay. The pieces are then returned to the high school for glaze firing and brought back a few days later as finished, functional objects creating a built‑in arc of anticipation, completion, and pride.
In just a short time, the program has engaged dozens of children, adolescents, and caregivers, many from medically complex or socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. At OU Children’s, ceramics sessions have offered brief islands of normalcy for families navigating rare cancer diagnoses, open‑heart surgery, and prolonged hospital stays. Parents have described the process as calming and restorative, and the act of making together has often opened unexpected conversations about fear, hope, and meaning. At PIVOT and SISU, youth experiencing housing instability or other adversities have discovered a sense of ownership in creating something beautiful that is entirely theirs to keep.
To support and sustain this work, the students formalized H&E Healing Arts as an Oklahoma nonprofit corporation, drafted bylaws, established a board, and built partnerships with an art therapist, hospital leadership, and community organizations. They have raised initial funds to support materials and transport and are now contributing to the development of a multipurpose art therapy room at the new children’s behavioral health center at OU Health, with the goal that every child who passes through will have access to a creative outlet, regardless of ability to pay. Alongside program delivery, they are designing an IRB‑submitted study to evaluate patient and caregiver wellness before and after sessions, aiming to add much‑needed data on ceramics‑based art experiences in pediatric care and to offer a blueprint that other students and institutions can adapt.
What has emerged at OU Medicine is more than a series of art events. It is a student‑led, art therapist–partnered model that links a high school kiln, a medical campus, and multiple community sites into one coherent ceramics workflow. It lowers practical barriers that often keep clay out of hospitals, while preserving the tactile, relational, and narrative power of the medium. For the founders, this work has become a formative part of their medical education: a reminder that healing can also be held in the hands, one fired piece at a time, and an invitation for peers across the country to build similar bridges between arts and health in their own communities.