Senior Care Facilities With World Class Art

Artworks by Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Marc Chagall and Alex Katz adorn the walls. There is a fabric and paper collage by Romare Bearden, and a drawing by Diego Rivera. A corridor is lined with 10 silk-screened portraits by Andy Warhol and a few of William Wegman’s photolithographs of his bedecked Weimaraner dogs.

This is not some museum in the middle of Manhattan, or a billionaire’s estate. It is the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, a senior care facility in the Bronx. Its 32-acre campus offers nursing and rehabilitation services and assisted and independent living. But it also houses a collection of more than 5,000 mostly modern and contemporary works of art by a roster of world-class artists, in addition to 1,400 Jewish ceremonial objects that constitute the Derfner Judaica Museum. The Derfner, along with a sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River, another exhibition space called the Elma and Milton A. Gilbert Pavilion Gallery and all the hallways of the Hebrew Home, are filled with art, intended not only for the population that resides there but for the public as well.

“Art is an integral part of life here,” said Emily O’Leary, associate curator of the Derfner Judaica Museum + the Art Collection at Hebrew Home at Riverdale, as the museum is officially known. She said the collection was started in the early 1970s with the aim of bringing art to the residents. “Because many of them can’t go out to museums,” she said, “the idea was to bring the museum to them.”

Senior Care Facilities With World Class Art