GSSW Aids 'Art and Identity' Symposium
Arts seen as benefit for isolated chronically or mentally ill patients
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The Graduate School of Social Work will co-sponsor a symposium tomorrow that explores how persons with severe and chronic medical conditions or mental illness can use the fine arts to express themselves — and in so doing, reclaim their sense of self."Art and Identity" will be held from 9 a.m.-noon at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, which is coordinating the event with GSSW and Shattuck Partners.
Prof. Emeritus Elaine Pinderhughes (GSSW) will be a featured speaker at the symposium, along with National Center of Afro-American Artists Director E. Barry Gaither and George Hunt, an award-winning artist whose work encompasses preserving African American cultural traditions and history.
Coinciding with the conference is an exhibition by participants in a visual and spoken arts program for patients at Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain. The program's main organizers, Massachusetts College of Arts Professor Kofi Kayiga, Museum of Afro-American History Education Director L'Merchie Frazier and Shattuck Hospital psychologist Robert McMackin, will be among the speakers at the event.
Organizers of the symposium, including Adj. Assoc. Prof. Paul Kline (GSSW), say "Art and Identity" offers a valuable perspective on several inter-related social and health care issues. Patients like those at Shattuck — most of whom are coping with long-term psychiatric, medical or substance abuse problems — tend to feel largely isolated from the rest of the world, Kline notes.
For the diverse Shattuck population, Kline says, there's an additional challenge: reclaiming their ethnic, as well as personal, identity.
"The focus of the symposium is not on symptoms, disease or pathology — as important as those may be, of course," explains Kline. "What you have is a largely ignored population whose sense of self is diminished by the world around them. Yet they are able to stake a claim to their identity, despite the many challenges they are facing, by drawing, painting, writing or other artistic activities."
McMackin added, "This is a client population with generally poor verbal skills and dealing with major stresses — issues. But art gives them a means to say — even just to themselves — who they are and what they're experiencing.
"This is not 'art therapy,' but rather an exploration of the creative process with a highly vulnerable group of people."
McMackin and Kline said GSSW's curricular and administrative initiatives in diversity made the school an appropriate partner for the "Art and Identity" conference.
The National Center for African American Artists [ncaaa.org] is located at 30 Walnut Avenue in Boston. A brochure on the conference is available at the Graduate School of Social Work Web site, www.bc.edu/schools/gssw/.