ART GIVES STROKE, ALZHEIMERS PATIENTS OUTLET FOR EXPRESSION
Barbara Arthur held a thick brush loaded with dark orange paint near a blank sheet of paper for a long time. She stared at the paper, then the paint. She looked lost, confused. Then she tentatively dabbed on a line and a curve. A rough outline of a horse's head appeared before she abruptly stopped.
"I messed it up," she said. "I didn't do it right."
"You get to be as creative as you want," said Bruceville Terrace activities director Jenny Cohn.
"Look what I did," said Arthur, 65, still fretting that the horse's eye was a smudged blot.
"There are no mistakes here," said Janice Horne, an art therapist who works as an activities coordinator at the skilled nursing facility.
One morning a month, a small group of Bruceville Terrace residents in long-term care – primarily stroke survivors, people with Alzheimer's disease and people suffering from brain trauma – attend Horne's watercolor class.
Some of them can't walk anymore. Some can't talk. But they can hold specially designed brushes and swipe shapes and swirls of watercolors onto paper.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/11/07/4035022/art-gives-stroke-alzheimers-patients.html#storylink=cpy
MORE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/16/art-stroke-recovery-appreciation_n_1354015.html?ref=topbar&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009
"I messed it up," she said. "I didn't do it right."
"You get to be as creative as you want," said Bruceville Terrace activities director Jenny Cohn.
"Look what I did," said Arthur, 65, still fretting that the horse's eye was a smudged blot.
"There are no mistakes here," said Janice Horne, an art therapist who works as an activities coordinator at the skilled nursing facility.
One morning a month, a small group of Bruceville Terrace residents in long-term care – primarily stroke survivors, people with Alzheimer's disease and people suffering from brain trauma – attend Horne's watercolor class.
Some of them can't walk anymore. Some can't talk. But they can hold specially designed brushes and swipe shapes and swirls of watercolors onto paper.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/11/07/4035022/art-gives-stroke-alzheimers-patients.html#storylink=cpy
MORE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/16/art-stroke-recovery-appreciation_n_1354015.html?ref=topbar&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009
No art? No social change. No innovation economy.
http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/no_art_no_social_change._no_innovation_economy
By Eric Friedenwald-Fishman | 15 | May. 26, 2011
Welcome to the creative crisis. Welcome to a nation unable to solve its problems, incapable of civil discourse, bogged down in a morass of multicultural conflict, and lagging the global innovation marketplace. Just look forward a generation or two, and this will be America if we do not address the dearth of investment in art and imaginative capacity.
As social entrepreneurs, we have not stepped up as champions because we are not seeing the impacts that arts can have on every issue we care about. For too long we have allowed arts and culture to be treated as a nicety—the first budget cut and the last investment made. In the last 30 years, we have seen our nation’s investment in the arts decline as advocates for the arts have scrambled to communicate relevancy through the frames of educational achievement, creative economy investment, and economic development—these are all true but undersell the power of art.
I have had the opportunity to work on poverty alleviation, educational equity, environmental health, and many other issues. Increasingly, I see that solutions to our most critical problems are not to be found in institutional hierarchy or traditional policy and enforcement models, but rather in collective action, dispersed innovation, and shared responsibility. For example: About 35 years ago, we had a water pollution problem. We passed the Clean Water Act and enforced shutting down 100,000 pipes that dumped toxins into our rivers. Today, more river miles are polluted (not from industrial polluters, but from the actions of individual Americans that end up impacting their watersheds).
There is no way to monitor and enforce whether every American conserves water, makes alternative transportation choices, etc. However, when people and communities are armed with information, imagination, and the ability to engage with one another, we can change public will, our actions, and impacts. This is true for protecting our drinking water, preventing child abuse, dealing with climate change, and the list goes on.
By Eric Friedenwald-Fishman | 15 | May. 26, 2011
Welcome to the creative crisis. Welcome to a nation unable to solve its problems, incapable of civil discourse, bogged down in a morass of multicultural conflict, and lagging the global innovation marketplace. Just look forward a generation or two, and this will be America if we do not address the dearth of investment in art and imaginative capacity.
As social entrepreneurs, we have not stepped up as champions because we are not seeing the impacts that arts can have on every issue we care about. For too long we have allowed arts and culture to be treated as a nicety—the first budget cut and the last investment made. In the last 30 years, we have seen our nation’s investment in the arts decline as advocates for the arts have scrambled to communicate relevancy through the frames of educational achievement, creative economy investment, and economic development—these are all true but undersell the power of art.
I have had the opportunity to work on poverty alleviation, educational equity, environmental health, and many other issues. Increasingly, I see that solutions to our most critical problems are not to be found in institutional hierarchy or traditional policy and enforcement models, but rather in collective action, dispersed innovation, and shared responsibility. For example: About 35 years ago, we had a water pollution problem. We passed the Clean Water Act and enforced shutting down 100,000 pipes that dumped toxins into our rivers. Today, more river miles are polluted (not from industrial polluters, but from the actions of individual Americans that end up impacting their watersheds).
There is no way to monitor and enforce whether every American conserves water, makes alternative transportation choices, etc. However, when people and communities are armed with information, imagination, and the ability to engage with one another, we can change public will, our actions, and impacts. This is true for protecting our drinking water, preventing child abuse, dealing with climate change, and the list goes on.
NEA chief to visit Yolo's Art & Ag Project
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/02/21/4277880/nea-chief-to-visit-yolos-art-ag.html#storylink=misearch
Published: Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 1D
Last Modified: Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 - 12:32 pmBringing together artists and farmers in Yolo County is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Yet the federal agency is doing just that through its ArtPlace initiative, teaming up with a consortium of companies and foundations to fund art projects in communities around the nation.
This effort will bring NEA chief Rocco Landesman to Woodland today for a visit to Yolo County's "Art & Ag Project."
The project, overseen by YoloArts, the county's nonprofit arts advocacy organization, has artists interacting with farmers at their farms and creating artwork. ArtPlace has given YoloArts $63,000 this year, as part of the first year of the project in which $11.5 million was doled out to 34 locally initiated projects.
"This is going to be very community-oriented ...," Landesman said. "The whole notion here is that it is place-based grantmaking, and the Yolo grant is kind of a poster child for what we are doing."
ArtPlace originated with Landesman and the Ford Foundation, and signals a profound change in federal arts funding. Rather than shouldering arts funding alone with a small budget, the NEA is bringing companies and foundations to the funding table under the rubric of "creative placemaking."
During Landesman's two-year tenure at the NEA, he has worked to establish partnerships with such disparate agencies as the U.S. departments of Commerce, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development.
Now he has trained his focus on the private sector. With ArtPlace, a commitment of $2 million has been secured from 10 private entities, including the Ford, Rockefeller and Irvine foundations and Bloomberg. In California, Irvine has pledged $2 million for ArtPlace.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/02/21/4277880/nea-chief-to-visit-yolos-art-ag.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy
Published: Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 1D
Last Modified: Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 - 12:32 pmBringing together artists and farmers in Yolo County is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Yet the federal agency is doing just that through its ArtPlace initiative, teaming up with a consortium of companies and foundations to fund art projects in communities around the nation.
This effort will bring NEA chief Rocco Landesman to Woodland today for a visit to Yolo County's "Art & Ag Project."
The project, overseen by YoloArts, the county's nonprofit arts advocacy organization, has artists interacting with farmers at their farms and creating artwork. ArtPlace has given YoloArts $63,000 this year, as part of the first year of the project in which $11.5 million was doled out to 34 locally initiated projects.
"This is going to be very community-oriented ...," Landesman said. "The whole notion here is that it is place-based grantmaking, and the Yolo grant is kind of a poster child for what we are doing."
ArtPlace originated with Landesman and the Ford Foundation, and signals a profound change in federal arts funding. Rather than shouldering arts funding alone with a small budget, the NEA is bringing companies and foundations to the funding table under the rubric of "creative placemaking."
During Landesman's two-year tenure at the NEA, he has worked to establish partnerships with such disparate agencies as the U.S. departments of Commerce, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development.
Now he has trained his focus on the private sector. With ArtPlace, a commitment of $2 million has been secured from 10 private entities, including the Ford, Rockefeller and Irvine foundations and Bloomberg. In California, Irvine has pledged $2 million for ArtPlace.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/02/21/4277880/nea-chief-to-visit-yolos-art-ag.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy
