Can Original Art Give a Small Office a Reason to Return?
Angela Simeone · Last updated: 12 October 2026
In short: A mandate can fill desks, but it cannot make a room worth the commute. Gensler's Ray Yuen says workplaces now have to be "more than work," and one wall of original art is the smallest way to start. A single painting gives colleagues something to stop at and talk about, and a small company can choose it the way a large one does: for the room it will hold, one wall at a time.
Why is the office asking for a reason to return?
Because the calls to come back have outrun the reasons. Fortune reported in December 2025 that Amazon, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have called employees back five days a week, and that Instagram announced a similar mandate that month. Instagram's chief justified it as a way to boost "cooperation" and "creativity."
Ray Yuen, office managing director at Gensler, told Fortune's Brainstorm Design forum what the people designing those rooms now face: "We're no longer just designing workplaces, we're actually designing experiences." And then the instruction: "You've really got to make the campus or the workplace more than work, and that's the fun part of it."
What does a wall add that a perk cannot?
A reason to look twice. A perk is consumed; a painting stays and keeps giving the eye something new. A 2025 workplace-design report from RI Workplace, cited on a workplace design blog in December 2025, describes art as providing "conversation starters and emotional focal points." That blog belongs to an art-rental business, so read it as a trade view, but the phrase is exact: a focal point is where people stop, and a conversation starter is why they speak.
Artists who have made work for offices describe the same job. Quána Madison painted a mural for PwC's Miami offices "as a visual reminder to practice gratitude and to cultivate joy in meaningful ways everyday." Jacob Brown, whose painting Hutchman 24 hangs at Humana's Louisville campus, describes his process as work that "adds to the surface until I find some sort of harmony that is more than just the sum of my movements." Both comments were reported by Allwork.Space in June 2024. A painting in a workplace carries a person's decisions into a room full of other people's days.
Friedrich Nietzsche gave the larger reason in The Will to Power: "We have art in order not to die of the truth." An open-plan floor on a gray afternoon is a small version of that truth.
Does a smaller company need a large budget?
It needs a single wall chosen well. Rapid7 rotates 18 artists through its Boston and El Segundo offices, which is a program; a smaller company can start with one painting at the end of a corridor or over the table where a team meets. One painting changes how a floor is remembered, and it is easier to live with than a program, because nobody has to maintain it.
How do you choose a painting for a shared room?
Begin with the wall: its light, its distance from the door, and who passes it most. A large canvas suits a room that needs a story told; a pair suits a long corridor. I paint originals and commissions for specific walls, and for a commission I paint two options at once so the room's decision-makers choose between two finished directions. My paintings hang in a Nashville hotel and in a downtown commercial building, where the work has to hold a room of strangers every day, and the same thinking carries into an office. Paintings travel rolled to a framer near you, who stretches them, and they arrive ready to hang.
A place people would miss is a place that gave the eye something to return to. One wall can start that.
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Frequently asked questions
Can art really give employees a reason to come into the office?
It can give them something worth looking at and talking about. Gensler's Ray Yuen says workplaces have to be more than work, and a workplace-design report cited by TurningArt describes art as providing conversation starters and emotional focal points.
Does a small company need a big art budget?
No. One original painting on a well-chosen wall, such as the end of a corridor or the wall over a team table, changes how a floor is remembered.
How do you choose art for a shared workspace?
Start with the wall: its light, its distance from the door and who passes it most. Choose scale for the room, and work with a painter who can make the piece for that specific wall.
Can a painter make a commission for an office wall?
Yes. This studio makes commissions for one specific wall and paints two options at once, so you choose between two finished directions.