By Sunayana Prabhu
EATONTOWN – Nearly 300 community members spent July 16 to 18 at the Anne Vogel Family Care and Wellness Center placing thousands of colorful glass tiles into grids during a hands-on workshop hosted by Monmouth Medical Center. Their work will become a sweeping, two-story mosaic in the lobby of the new outpatient Specialty and Cancer Care Center at the Vogel Medical Campus in Tinton Falls, set to open in early 2027.
The collaborative art project, created in partnership with Texas-based Mosaic Workshop Studio, is intended to serve as a permanent, soothing focal point for patients and families.
“This is going to be like a wall of inclusion with so many people that have the opportunity to come and to participate and put their little stamp on it,” said Gwendolyn Love, executive director of Lunch Break, who participated in the workshop. “Knowing that it’s going to be part of something bigger, I think, was just really nice. We felt honored that we were asked to participate.”
“We chose to create this mosaic because it supports our commitment to community engagement, enabling hundreds of community members, regardless of age or ability, to help us create a permanent art piece that will live in our specialty and cancer care center,” said Jenna DiBartolo, acting vice president of the Vogel Medical Campus project, in a news release. “It’s an opportunity for our community and our team members to connect and create, and then see the beautiful outcome of that.”
Over the course of three days, area legislators, hospital staff, donors, patients and local nonprofit partners (including Lunch Break, Shore House and Brookdale Community College), students from the Long Branch Unit of the Boys & Girls Club of Monmouth County, and the T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center, among others, participated in the sessions.
Using 1-foot-square templates, they followed simple guides to place thousands of glass tiles, resembling a large-scale paint-by-numbers technique.
The completed installation will cover just under 400 square feet across three tall panels in the new lobby and include more than 65,000 glass tiles.
“It’s like three large columns, 20 feet tall in the lobby,” said artist Jay Muzacz, who runs Mosaic Workshop Studio in Austin, Texas. “We did the math – 68,635 tiles,” he said.
Muzacz said the hospital gave him an overall brief focused on creating a healing, calming environment that would complement other curated artwork and interior finishes in the building. Accordingly, he pursued a design “that’s both calming, dynamic, that has depth and space, that gives it a sense of growth and of upward mobility and upward momentum, because ultimately, people are going here for healing,” Muzacz said. He chose to create an art installation primarily in blue tones that looks like a “towering waterfall” descending from the second level to the lobby.
For Muzacz, whose past projects include large public mosaics in Texas and abroad, the Tinton Falls installation is both an artistic challenge and a chance to contribute to future patients.
“People come in with heavy burdens and we want them to leave without that,” he said. “It’s our duty while building structures to make them beautiful, and I’m playing my part.”
The project builds on earlier efforts to involve the public in plans for the new Specialty and Cancer Care Center. The center is currently under construction on 36 acres at the former Fort Monmouth Myer Center site in Tinton Falls, at Corregidor Road and Pearl Harbor Avenue. In 2024, staff and community members were invited to sign the final steel beam for the five-story, 150,000-square-foot center.
The Specialty and Cancer Care Center is Phase 1 of a two-phase redevelopment of the site purchased in 2022 by Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health (RWJBH), of which Monmouth Medical Center is affiliated.
Eric Carney, president and chief executive officer of Monmouth Medical Center and its Southern Campus in Lakewood, said the first phase of the Vogel Medical Campus focuses on the outpatient cancer care center, and the second on a new acute care hospital.
The Specialty and Cancer Care Center that will house the mosaic art, “will be a freestanding surgery center as well as an imaging center.” The facility is set to open in February 2027. The cancer care center will offer comprehensive same-day surgery, on-site specialty physician offices and advanced diagnostic imaging, along with state-of-the-art cancer services delivered in partnership with Rutgers Cancer Institute.
“Phase 2 will be the acute care hospital and the rest of the campus,” Carney said. The 252-bed hospital is in the design and approvals pipeline, with construction to follow. “We’re finishing our first phase of the design, which is our schematic design, and then by early fall we’ll be starting our design development, which should take us to the end of the year,” Carney said. After another year estimated for approvals, “we’ll probably formally start building, erecting steel, in 2028,” he said.
Carney noted that most of what will be offered at the Vogel Medical campus will add to, rather than replace, Monmouth Medical Center’s century-old services in Long Branch. He added that “the care in Long Branch has not changed and will not change until the new acute care hospital opens up. If anything, it’s expanding and growing.”
The article originally appeared in the July 23 – 29, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.
