Browse Public Art

Harborview Pillows

Beliz Brother

Harborview Medical Center

An elegant installation conjures contemplation and dreaming.

Beliz Brother. Harborview Pillows, 1997. Powder coated steel, steel, and bamboo. Harborview Medical Center, Seattle, WA. King County Public Art Collection. Photo: Joe Manfredini

In the courtyard adjacent to Harborview’s main lobby, two deep blue rectangular forms appear to float in one corner, gently canted, like a pair of pillows tossed from an open window.

Artist Beliz Brother approached the site of Harborview Pillows as if it were a stage set, dramatizing the space with a meditative sculptural installation that can be seen from many of the hospital’s windows. The artwork’s rich and reflective color simultaneously suggests night and day, clouds and clear sky, ocean and atmosphere. Despite their apparent buoyancy, the painted steel forms each weigh three tons. Beliz Brother balanced them with a third, more delicate element: a half-sphere bronze planter filled with black stalk bamboo that rustles softly against the courtyard’s walls, in effect casting the walls as cliffs and the blue forms as a pool at the bottom of a canyon.
Continue Reading ›

About the Location

Harborview Medical Center

For more than a century, Harborview Medical Center has functioned as a unique community and regional resource. It is a county hospital, a teaching and research institution, a regional trauma and burn center, and the primary health care provider for many low-income and disenfranchised people in the community. Harborview embraces its mission of treating everybody…

Read more about the art and artists at Harborview Medical Center. More >

More by this Artist