This exhibition details the journey of conservation and hints at the power of art to heal. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of art therapy. While the halls and galleries of a Museum are my temple of healing, I would like to experience art’s power to heal in other settings such as classrooms, hospitals or shelters.

I recently had a conversation with two dear friends–one of whom is an art therapist/art teacher at a school for emotionally troubled kids in Virginia and the other of whom has experienced the healing of power of art at a local Indiana treatment center called Selah House. Their insights are shared below:

[Art therapist & teacher]
How do you become an art therapist?
To practice art therapy and to be considered an art therapist, you need to have a Master’s degree in art therapy. There are sometimes other requirements for practicing in various settings, but that is the minimum level. Refer to the American Art Therapy Association Web site for more.

How difficult is it to find work as an art therapist?
Location makes a big difference. It is difficult to be hired directly as an art therapist outside of major cities, primarily because art therapy is a relatively new field. With additional licensure and experience, you can be hired as a counselor, social worker or the like. If you would like to work outside of a major city, you would want to take additional graduate school credits in counseling and seek an LPC (Licensed Professional Counselor).

What do you consider the best and worst parts of your job?
I like working with adolescents who nobody else really enjoys working with. They are the kids who have tried really hard to get the adults in their life to give up on them. They feel like failures. Seeing them find a voice for self-expression in art and become successful at it, and therefore develop a sense of self-worth and more motivation to succeed in other areas of life, makes all the work worthwhile. Good art therapists are artists who have had life-changing or life-defining moments with their own artwork. They are the ones who understand the power that art has to heal.

What are the differences between art therapists and art teachers?
I think there are more similarities between them. I act as both, so I know that it requires more of a desire to help a student develop artistic skills to be an art teacher. Art teachers guide students with lesson plans designed to help them develop these skills. Art therapists guide clients with counseling skills and art tasks designed to help clients navigate whatever waters they are navigating in counseling. They both use art very intentionally.

Therapists need to be willing to look at deep issues. In doing that, you end up exploring a lot of deep emotional material that resonates with your own emotional life and life experiences. Judy Rubin, a renowned art therapist, said, “You cannot take clients where you have not been yourself.” Self-care is crucial, as is having good professional boundaries.

Art teachers need to be able to manage a classroom. You have to be comfortable with yourself as an authority member and being in front of a class. You have to be prepared and on your toes at all times so there is a lot of planning.

What contemporary art lends itself to art therapy exercises?
Dawoud Bey’s photography speaks to my students in a powerful way. They get really excited about it and can relate to it on many levels.

[Former art therapy patient]
What was it like to experience art therapy first hand as a patient?
While I could conceptually imagine what “art therapy” would be like, it was amazing to actually experience it. You think you know exactly what’s in your head…but when you draw and create what’s in there, it can be truly eye-opening. There’s something about taking the intangible and creating something concrete out of it. While it was difficult to dig through all the negative thoughts and emotions in my head, it was an incredibly freeing experience to see them on paper, work through them in therapy, and eventually literally burn them up to let them go.

Class Picture Day on Flickr

Groups on Flickr are often hard to seed.  Like a lot of the digital content, an audience does not flock to a website, just because it is published.  It takes a connection with an audience, an innovative or compelling idea, sometimes a bit of luck and great timing or me urging in a blog post.  In our Class Picture Day group, a few IMA staffers (Despi, Noelle, Ruth and Sarah) were brave enough to post their own class photos, to initiate the process.  I was amazed by their commitment to the cause and willingness to put their brilliant pictures from yesteryear online.  I hesitated and used an excuse now echoed by many throughout the halls of the IMA: I can’t find my yearbook.  Come on!

I and others continue to harass our colleagues to submit.  It does take commitment – you have to find a yearbook or the actual photo, you have to scan the image, you have to login to Flickr and upload (you might even need to create a yahoo username to do this) – so I get the time involved.  But, now that even I submitted an image, that excuse is no longer valid.  I uploaded a terribly embarrassing image of myself this morning.  I guess I am committed to the cause and I think you should be too.

As we all age, our class pictures lose that relevance of the pop culture and time period, so when they are viewed years later, well, they appear funny or outdated or slightly embarrassing.  I personally love them.  So I’m challenging our readers, find your Class Picture Day images and post them to our group.  You’ll become part of an online community that was willing to laugh in the face of potential humiliation and just go for it.

Can you do it?

Interview with artist Dawoud Bey
As published in the fall issue of the IMA’s Previews membership magazine

Q. Can you tell us when you became interested in portraiture?
As I began to figure out what I wanted to do as an artist, I was spending a lot of time going to museums and galleries looking at work by other photographers. The pictures that resonated for me most strongly were those that were of human subjects. There seemed to me something quite powerful about a person confronting the camera, returning the attention of the photographer. Early on I was most struck by the photographs by Mike Disfarmer that I saw at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid-70s. I also was struck by Richard Avedon’s show of portraits at Marlboro Gallery around that same time. James Van Der Zee’s photographs had impressed me in the Harlem On My Mind exhibition. I wanted to make photographs that resonated for me the way those photographs had.

Q. How did you begin to focus on photographing teenage students?
Young people became the primary subject of my work in 1992, when I was invited to do a residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Andover. During the eight weeks I was there, I photographed both students at Phillips and students from Lawrence High School, a town a few minutes away. I also worked with the teachers to extend the idea of the portrait into the classroom in other forms, including writings produced by the students. I began to realize how much young people were excluded from the fabric of “the art world” as I knew it and how much their images had been stereotyped in the larger culture over the years. I decided then that I wanted to construct a more complex representation of these young people while also engaging in my own ideas about the photographic object.

Q. Can you talk about how you develop your relationship with the students you work with?
My relationship with the students actually begins while photographing them. I make photographs as a way to find out something about someone. I don’t attempt to develop a relationship and then translate that relationship into a picture; I do my finding out through the camera. All of the pictures in Class Pictures were made by spending two or three weeks in each school. Usually I have only 45 minutes in which to take a student’s photograph, since the student has been released from class in order for me to photograph them. Before making the photograph I ask the student to sit quietly for a few minutes and write something about themselves. Once they are done I make the pictures without reading what they have written. I think if a portrait is well done the viewer is left with a feeling that they have connected to the life of another human being, even though they may be a stranger. The photographs are posed and highly staged, but with an eye towards creating an appearance of informality.

Q. What advice would you give to a young Indianapolis student looking to discover his or her own voice through art?
I would say look at as much art as you can, and make as much art as you can. Never stop looking, and never stop learning. The whole history of art is available to you; it is up to you to know that history and to figure out what you want to contribute to it. Then seek out the training and education that will allow you to accomplish that. And have fun too!

Class Picture Day on Flickr!
In celebration of Bey’s exhibition, we’re inviting you to share your own high school pictures. Artist Dawoud Bey displays statements written by the students alongside the portraits he captures. Be sure to include your own caption.

Submit your class photos, past or present, and we’ll post our favorites here on the IMA Blog!

Check out this photo on Flickr to see a diagram of my crazy.

This is a super-busy time for the Nugget Factory and it just sort of happened.  For a couple of days last week, Daniel was out of the office with Dan shooting some video in San Francisco for the upcoming show, Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty. I found myself sitting at my desk, working at a normal pace…and bored out of my mind.  Two days later, with the full factory back in action, things sort of erupted, with new tasks flying in at every angle.  I guess I prefer it that way…Check out this selection of stuff we have coming soon:

• A new Flickr project giving you a look at some conservation work done by IMA conservators in conjunction with the exhibition, Preserving a Legacy: Wishard Hospital Murals (coming January 2009)
  
• The website for Power and Glory, which will integrate video in a way we have never tried before (coming October 2008)
• A full length documentary on Maya Lin that is in the home stretch, we hope you can see this late 2008
• The special web presence featuring Type A, in the final stages of editing, getting ready for the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park groundbreaking on September 18th
• A new Flickr group called “Class Picture Day” – submit your own class photo inspired by the exhibition, Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey (You should submit your class photo, but even if you don’t you can find mine on there!)
• Two audio tracks recorded by the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra for you to enjoy, inspired by works of art in the American Galleries

So that is a just a taste for the next couple of months.  We’ll keep you posted as new things come up.  Next year will be bringing some super exciting things that you will definitely hear about here, so stay tuned!!