Ohana: Hope and healing’s brick and mortar — Soft edges and sunshine bring peace and possibility
Art shown: Kara Maria (American, born 1968), Here Comes the Sun (Sierra Nevada red fox), 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 74 x 50 in. Montage Health Art Collection, Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund, 2022 © Kara Maria.
Leah Rosenberg (American and Canadian, born America, 1979) Wind, waves/Season change —/Rain, trees/Dancing leaves, 2023. Commission made possible by the Maurine Church Coburn Endowment Fund. © Leah Rosenberg
Look left. Look right. Look anywhere really — even over there under the reception desk — and you will see it. Or simply stand where you are and feel it. The warm embrace. The rays of brightness. Almost every room in these 55,600 square feet has access to sunlight.
Everyone is here to build a foundation for mental fitness. Some will come amid scattered showers. Others will feel caught in a torrential downpour. But the skies are clearing because Ohana — Montage Health’s innovative child and adolescent mental health program — officially opened its building doors just before the 2023 holidays.
We have this saying here, that the building is our partner in healing. When people come in, immediately their nervous system calms down a notch. They say, ‘It’s so peaceful in here.’
— Krista Reuther, Assistant Director of Community Health and Prevention for Ohana
Ohana's campus entrance.
With that opening came a new possibility of peace for those in crisis, in pain, and those who would go to the mat for their struggling youth — if only they knew how.
Now they will. That is just as Bertie Bialek Elliott imagined when she donated nearly $106 million to Montage Health Foundation for the project back in January of 2018. You could say this place, winding its way through the hills just off Highway 68 in Monterey, has sunshine in every corner. But there are no corners. By design. It’s serpentine sunshine. Sunshine in the parking lot. Sunshine in patient rooms. And those who work here lasso it relentlessly. They know it brings the energy of healing. And the power of hope.
Those two things — hope and healing — drive everything here.
It started with the ideal architect — Seattle-based NBBJ — a group that immediately understood the need to create a very different, award-winning kind of building. “We have this saying here, that the building is our partner in healing,” says Krista Reuther, Assistant Director of Community Health and Prevention for Ohana. “When people come in, immediately their nervous system calms down a notch. They say, ‘It’s so peaceful in here.’”
Hence the curves, not corners. Floor-to-ceiling windows that look directly onto vistas and canyons. Light, warm wood finishes. Open, inviting spaces.
And you can’t move into a place without hanging some art on the walls, right? And, oh, the art.
“It’s so beautiful and inspiring,” Reuther says. “The art team just blew us away with their selections.”
The Montage Health Art Program lives within Montage Health Foundation thanks to a philanthropic endowment from the late Maurine Church Coburn and ongoing contributions from the community to support art’s role in creating a healing environment in healthcare spaces.
It’s an exciting and energizing space, and there are also certain areas where you feel a sense of calm and serenity. That combined with colorful and uplifting artwork creates this sense of hope and excitement. So, someone going into the program who might be a little bit nervous can step into this space and think, ‘This is special. I’m going to be OK.’
— Elizabeth Denholm, Art Collections Manager for Montage Health Foundation
“Our team worked collaboratively to bring this space to life,” says Elizabeth Denholm, Art Collections Manager for Montage Health Foundation. “We needed the art to speak to youth and teenagers, to curate a space that felt like their own.”
That Ohana space is home to more than 200 artworks by 118 artists. That includes poems, large-scale murals, and an art-lending library of photographs by local student artists for the residential program, opening later in 2024.
“We have things like limited-edition printed skateboard decks mounted on the wall,” Denholm says. “And Andrew Wilson, a young artist, hand-sewed streetwear-style ballcaps. He used heirloom fabrics from his mother and grandmother to represent the idea of family connection. The goal was to feature non-traditional art objects that speak to the unique interests of our patients.”
One of the more prominent pieces is a mural by Leah Rosenberg, designed to capture a place and time through the lens of living color, and developed in collaboration with the Ohana Youth Advisory, a collective of local high school students who meet monthly with the Ohana Community Health and Prevention team to offer a youth voice and lens to Ohana’s work. Rosenberg held a workshop with the Ohana Youth Advisory in which they used paint chips to represent colors — colors they saw in their daily lives, colors that spoke to them — and then created haikus based on their chosen hues. Rosenberg incorporated these colors into her mural alongside others she observed throughout Monterey.
Step outside Ohana’s doors and you will discover the beginnings of an almost 900-square-foot garden that focuses on, yes, hope and healing.
“We want kids to get their hands in the soil, to help with planting, to be in nature,” Reuther says. “We want youth to pause and notice.”
Back inside, there are also a music room, art room, gym, and a community room that is open to the public and the site of free parenting education classes and groups.
“It’s an exciting and energizing space,” Denholm says, “and there are also certain areas where you feel a sense of calm and serenity. That combined with colorful and uplifting artwork creates this sense of hope and excitement. So, someone going into the program who might be a little bit nervous can step into this space and think, ‘This is special. I’m going to be OK.’"
Explore Ohana’s campus.
Colors that stay with you
The way Leah Rosenberg sees it, color and nature are the elixirs.
They have the capacity to improve moods, conjure memories, tell stories, bring calm and joy, and inspire growth. All of it comes together in her site-specific mural at Ohana.
Her 20-color palette, developed with contributions from the Ohana Youth Advisory, boldly greets those heading toward the check-in area at the new teen and adolescent behavioral health center. The colors — inspired by shifting light, changing seasons, the vision of the building, and the landscape that surrounds it — accompany them throughout their stay, and then follow them home.
“It walks with you in a way, this piece,” Rosenberg says. “The arrangement of the stripes coming together and then breaking apart is how the process of healing can sometimes feel. Some parts are orderly, and some are wildly complicated. No matter what culture or location people are coming from, or what language they speak, I hope these colors will make them feel welcome and understood.”
As patients and families make their way through the Ohana experience, those colors can be connective and/or invigorating, depending on the need.
And when they walk back out the front door, they can carry the powerful paints with them.
“It’s a lovely thing to think about, that when you observe something, you change it,” says Rosenberg, who calls the Bay Area home. “Through the simple act of looking, you are actually changing something, and to that end, you are changing, too. Paying close attention to single colors and to the collection of colors can help us pay attention to the world outside. So, the very palette that greets someone at the start of their stay can become familiar tools to take out into the world with them when they leave.”
