Fostered healing with award-winning sketches of fragile infants
The course at Carnegie Mellon University was titled “Art Making in Context,” a class in which students were asked to leave the self-contained world of college art to become involved with community institutions where art was not generally a component.
Student David Andrew Pegher chose Transitional Infant Care, a small Shadyside hospital for premature and medically fragile infants who were transitioning from a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit to home. He began sketching the babies, showing them without the tubes and wires.
“You’ve never seen anything like these sketches,” said Nancy Kennedy, who at the time was the nurse manager at TIC. “They brought out the individuality and beauty of each baby. He was extraordinarily sensitive, creative, compassionate. He saw things that other people didn’t see, but he was able to show those things to the rest of us.”
Those who knew Mr. Pegher said those qualities defined the Penn Hills native.
Mr. Pegher, 47, of Hummelstown, Dauphin County, died suddenly Tuesday at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center of a previously undetected heart ailment. He would have turned 48 on Memorial Day.
For the past 23 years, he was a third-grade teacher in the Derry Township School District in Hershey. Mr. Pegher was a volunteer with the Hummelstown Swim Team and the Lebanon Valley Otters Swim Teams and at his church, St. Joan of Arc in Hershey,
A Central Catholic High School graduate, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from CMU, his teaching certification from Chatham University and a Master’s of Education from Wilkes University.
While at CMU, Mr. Pegher began volunteering as a baby holder at TIC as part of the Art Making in Context course. He hit upon the idea of sketching the babies at TIC, now known as The Children’s Home of Pittsburgh’s Pediatric Specialty Hospital. Ms. Kennedy was so impressed with what Mr. Pegher was doing that she named him “Artist in Residence.”
“David sketched in such a way that all of that medical technology faded into the background and the true baby emerged” said Ms. Kennedy, of Crafton, now a freelance medical writer. “These drawings helped take away the anxiety and helped parents to see the beauty of the baby. His drawings were part of the healing for the parents.”
Ms. Kennedy, who wrote poems related to her work to relieve stress, collaborated with Mr. Pegher on a book of poetry and sketches from their work in the specialty hospital. The book, ‘’Baby Hands & Baby Feet — Poems and Drawings from the Nursery,’’ was chosen by the American Journal of Nursing as one of the best books of the 1996.
Mr. Pegher was made an Andrew Carnegie Society Scholar for his volunteer work in the nursery. And he won the Student Service Award upon his graduation from Carnegie Mellon.
There were two exhibits of Mr. Pegher’s work, and he and Ms. Kennedy did a presentation together at a national conference of the Association for the Care of Children in Hospitals about the place of art in health care.
“He did great things in a humble way.” Ms. Kennedy said. “Parents were speechless when they were given their sketches; David’s art brought hope and healing to people who really needed it.”
His mother, Rachael Pegher of Penn Hills, said her son “touched so many people. [His death] is just so shocking for everyone.”
In addition to his mother, Mr. Pegher is survived by his wife, Kimberly M. Pegher; children Mia and Jacob Pegher; father David J. Pegher of Penn Hills; brothers Christopher Pegher of Mt. Vernon, Va., and Matthew Pegher of Sparta, N.J.; sisters Jennifer Tallant of Hagerstown, Md., and Julie Tanouye of Green Tree.
A funeral Mass was Saturday. Contributions in Mr. Pegher’s memory may be made to the David A. Pegher Memorial Benefit Fund at https://sites.google.com/ view/davidapeghermemorialfund/home.