The paintings and drawings that arrived in Juliette Kniola's inbox during 2019 told a story her phone calls did not. Her sister, an artist in Wisconsin who lives with multiple mental health diagnoses, was going through a hard stretch that year, and their conversations carried grief, frustration, and anger. But the work she kept sending was bright, colorful, even joyful. "Through her art, I was able to see another side of her—the side that could still laugh and play and create something light in the midst of all she was carrying," Kniola writes in the origin story posted on the show's website. That contrast is where the Healing Art Show Bloomington began.
Kniola wanted her sister to feel less isolated and more connected to other artists. Searching for a way to do that, she found a Healing Art Show run by NAMI Wisconsin, an annual exhibition that had been giving artists with mental illness a public platform for more than a decade. The idea stayed with her. Five years later, the right partnerships finally aligned, and the vision moved from notion to reality. The first Healing Art Show Bloomington opened in October 2024, deliberately timed to World Mental Health Day on October 10.
That inaugural show was staged at the Sciences Library in the Chemistry Building on the IU Bloomington campus. It gathered artists whose work explored resilience, healing, hope, identity, and personal experience, and it invited visitors to have the conversations about mental health that so often get avoided. The second iteration, in October 2025, moved to the Cook Center in Maxwell Hall at 750 E. Kirkwood Avenue and grew, drawing a wider circle of local and regional artists. It was presented by NAMI Greater Bloomington Area and the IU Arts & Humanities Council, the two community partners whose support has carried the show forward.
Now comes the third iteration. The 2026 Healing Art Show Bloomington opens Friday, October 2, with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Cook Center, and runs through October 30. Admission is free, and there is no ticket or capacity cap—visitors can simply walk in during the venue's regular hours, Monday through Friday from noon to 4 p.m. The opening reception is timed to coincide with Bloomington's First Friday Gallery Walk, the monthly evening when galleries across town throw open their doors, so the show will join a citywide circuit of art-going that night.
The exhibition has reached capacity for artists this year, with 35 participating. Organizers describe it as a non-juried show—not a contest, with no prizes—open to artists of all levels. The point is not to rank anyone's work but to bring awareness to mental health and to show how art can help manage a sense of well-being. The show's stated goals are three, and they are simple: to bring awareness to mental health, to normalize conversations about it, and to stop the stigma that surrounds it. Organizers hope for strong representation from artists in and around Bloomington and Indianapolis.
This year's edition puts a renewed focus on the artists themselves and the stories behind their work. By sharing both artwork and personal perspectives, the 2026 show invites visitors to look past the surface of a piece and learn from the experiences of others—and to recognize the sense of community and belonging that can grow when people are willing to share their stories. That emphasis follows directly from the show's founding insight: that a painting or a drawing can reveal what a conversation cannot, and can offer a way to process complex emotions, step outside of them, and return with a different perspective.
The Cook Center itself is a fitting host. Housed inside Maxwell Hall, it describes its mission as making transformative experiences in the arts and humanities accessible to all people on campus, in Bloomington, and throughout Indiana. Its exhibition spaces sit on the first floor, reachable by an ADA-accessible entrance at the building's northwest corner, with an elevator just inside. Visitors with limited mobility can enter there directly; on-campus parking is available in the IMU Lot and the Poplars and Henderson garages, with city metered parking along Kirkwood, Indiana, Dunn, and Sixth Street.
The scale of the show has grown steadily—from a first-year experiment tied to a single awareness day to a month-long exhibition that has become a fixture of the fall arts calendar. But the throughline has not changed. It is still, at bottom, one person's response to a sister's artwork: the recognition that creativity can hold joy and difficulty at the same time, and that putting that work on a wall in public is one way to say the unsayable out loud. For 35 artists this October, the Cook Center offers exactly that—a room, a month, and an audience willing to look and to talk.