While the normally serene Vero Beach Museum of Art prepares to give way to a swarm of children in its summer camp, the classrooms in its education wing are being pressed into overtime when the grown-ups show up after dark.
This year, the evening escape from long days of lassitude are part of a conscious effort to expand the museum’s image as a community gathering place. Its trove of art treasures may inspire, soothe and enlighten, but so does the making of art, particularly in the company of others.
One such class includes a little creative lubricant: wine. Another focuses on yoga, part of what staffer Shanti Sanchez calls “contemplative arts.” Those courses dovetail with a new initiative begun in January, Art for Health’s Sake, which offers therapeutic art-making sessions for better mental and physical health.
That coursework – which includes the yoga class but not the one with wine – aims to nurture creativity while untangling the mental knots brought on by stress or anxiety. Tapping into emotions by putting form to feelings and switching the brain’s gears from life’s hard work has demonstrable benefits, health practitioners maintain. And that’s especially true for older people.
“There’s a lot of research about the benefits of arts engagement and creative activities for people are they grow older in order to prevent disease,” says Sanchez, youth programs manager.
Dawn Miller’s class, Unlocking Your Creativity is a beginner-level class that also falls into the Art for Health’s Sake category. Miller, who studied psychology at Florida State (and later got a master’s in biology at University of Mississippi) has worked in crisis intervention and mediation. She hopes to teach people to “quiet their inner critics” and “unlock their playful expressiveness” – good advice for all but the most confident and rambunctious, it would seem.
In addition, her class makes use of her training in therapeutic art: writing exercises are used to encourage self-expression when art is an unfamiliar language. Other exercises are designed to boost confidence.
“The classes are more oriented toward the process of personal expression and exploration rather than a traditional art class that emphasizes technical skills and finished products,” she says.
One student who took the same class earlier this year was so inspired that she “finally and fully quit her job,” says Miller. “She experienced what it was like to express yourself without so many ‘shoulds’ in your life.”
Another participant, this one in a class Miller called Big and Sloppy, told Miller she had “relearned how to play in her life,” after years of caring for a parent with dementia.
Other classes beyond the Art for Health’s Sake program take a more direct approach at uncorking the creative urge. A two-fisted painting class involves a brush in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, billed as Cork, Canvas and Company and held on most Thursdays through summer. Led by Christine Thomas, a self-taught artist who paints traditional canvases as well as faux-finishes, the group classes are limited to 18; last week’s was full, with a convivial crowd signing up online in advance.
Other classes rely on art-making’s natural high. There is a course in photography led by Aric Attas, whose degree in psychology merges with a master’s in photography to serve him well in encouraging others to look at things in new ways – including through a lens.
Another class, Art After Dark, offered June 17, allows participants to paint from a live model. Taught by Kim Weissenborn, the class description reads like a lyric from the musical “Hair.”
“Leave your worries at home,” it begins. “Enter the world where creativity thrives.” Weissenborn plays music during the session.
The Art for Health’s Sake classes are part of a “new and growing” initiative, according to Sanchez, inspired by the desire to expand on the museum’s community programming for people struggling with mental health issues. Under the new banner, a range of classes offering health benefits for all are being offered, including two this summer.
Training for the program’s instructors took place at the University of Florida last year, paid for by a group of donors called The Circle. The all-woman group first came together in 2009 specifically to enhance the museum’s educational outreach programs. Each making personal donations, they chose the UF training by vote last year, and provided money to fund an artist-in-residence program in public schools.
“It’s a growing trend in museums and a growing trend in places like hospitals to bring in the arts as a therapeutic enhancement to health and wellness,” said Sanchez.
The museum has long staffed art classes for patients with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, and this program serves them too. But in the community at large, there are also those dealing with bereavement, cancer treatment or memory loss and they are particularly welcomed to the program, Sanchez says.
The goal of activities is not to produce a work of art per se but to find comfort in the art-making itself.
“If you take a painting class, you’re doing that for yourself and to a certain extent, you’re going to relax and enjoy others. But in Art for Health’s Sake, you’re digging deeper in a more personal, human way. It’s more about the process than the end product.”
Sanchez stresses that while Art for Health’s Sake instructors are not certified art therapists, the classes are nonetheless a “therapeutic intervention.”
Weissenborn and Miller joined Sanchez at the Gainesville program.
“They have a whole tool kit of ways they can help,” she says. “Not only visual art – water colors or pastels – but the other arts like music and movement, drama and story-telling. All of those things are part of a creative experience that’s going to enhance the therapeutic benefits of the class.”
Miller, who works in pastels, now coordinates the Art for Health’s Sake program. Part of her job is to develop it further and that takes “a lot of relationship building,” says Sanchez.
Those relationships extend beyond the museum to organizations dealing with mental health issues. For a number of years, Weissenborn, a graduate of Parsons School of Design, has taught an intergenerational class at the museum involving older adults who mentor troubled teens in an art-making class.
New classes began showing up in January’s catalogue under the Art for Health’s Sake banner. The other adult summer classes are an off-season staple for the museum – and a godsend for stir-crazy grown-ups.
“We hear oftentimes from people, ‘I would love to be able to do this but I have no experience,’” Sanchez says. “We want people to come and have a good time and enjoy a glass of wine and make some art. And we’d love for them to say, ‘Maybe I’ll make art next time and I won’t even need the wine; I’ll take yoga instead.”
