Art and the children of Darfur

Animated textile arts

With technology these days you can give a voice to visual imagery by animating what was once static. This is a Bayeux Tapestry depicting a part of French history. There would be much to say on interpretation but that would ruin the fun.

Feminist subversion of the day–BraBall

A subversive feminist find.

The BraBall

Emily’s Latest Project

See The BraBall in Person!

The BraBall is Finished! A big THANK YOU!

Events & News – UPDATES

Photos of The BraBall – EVENTS/PHOTOS

Letters to The BraBall – LETTERS

Why The BraBall? – ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The Full BraBall Story – HERSTORY

BraBall Publicity – PRESS

BraBall Statistics – FACTS

powered by performancing firefox

Cross-cultural influences in Visual Culture

On this site you can find many research articles that cater to cross-cultural influences in aesthetic and artistic development
————————————————–

Click here to check out the Exhibition of Shojo Manga!

Homepage

It’s time to discuss and share our ideas of what visual culture is, how it influences children, and finally the possibility of implementing visual culture in art educational curricula.”

Healing through the creation of art

SlipDontFall.jpg (Image JPEG, 799×619 pixels)
The Times Plus, Monroe Times, Monroe, Wisconsin, USA

Healing through the creation of art

 
Published Monday, January 22, 2007 10:17:33 AM Central Time

By Ellen Williams-Masson

MONROE – Jennifer Edge believes in the power of art. Jennifer Edge of the Primitive Soul Art Studio guides a home-school class of art students as they select images for an “I have a dream” collage in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Pictured, from left, are John Keizer, Vincent Carus, Calli Vestin and Spencer Vestin.
Times photo: Ellen Williams-Masson

Creating art can help reshape life experiences that may be too painful for words, providing an outlet for emotions that may be therapeutic in the hands of an experienced art therapist.

“Sometimes clients aren’t able to talk about what has happened to them, or maybe they have retold and retold their stories, but when you bring in the art something different happens, something can change,” Edge said.

Edge is an art therapist at the Primitive Soul Art Studio in Monroe.

“When we put those experiences into art, we can process them and get them out. We can put our anger into the art; we can break things and then make something new out of it. It’s almost like a mirror they can look into Š and sometimes there’s a moment of ‘aha.’”

Edge has a master’s degree in art therapy and is an outpatient and in-home art therapist for Oregon Mental Health Services. Edge also works as a teen specialist for the Parental Stress Center in Madison, which offers peer support to parents and families under stress.

Through serving as the Parent Stressline coordinator, Edge helps maintain a free and confidential resource for parents experiencing stress.

The third hat Edge wears is as owner of the Primitive Soul Art Studio, where she offers traditional art classes as well as individual and group art therapy. She said that it was important for her to make the studio a welcoming place for everyone, and having a mixture of traditional art classes with professional art therapy sessions helps protect client privacy.

“I wanted to make it a place where there’s no stigma about walking through the door,”

Edge said. “No one knows why anyone is coming in here. In a small community it’s really important that we have confidentiality.”

Edge will be presenting a talk, “In search of the primitive soul,” at the Monroe Arts Center at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 25. After using case studies to illustrate how art therapy can be used to complement other therapy methods, Edge will help attendees find their “primitive soul” through a 30-minute art making session.

“I define a primitive soul as a being that expresses whatever they feel, however they feel, through art, without holding back, without inhibitions,” Edge said. “A primitive soul creates because of their instinctual call to create.”

Edge said that people are born into the world with a primitive desire to create, but that innate passion can be lost as people become more inhibited about expressing themselves through art.

“As an art therapist, I believe it is my calling to help individuals uncover their primitive soul, finding the artist within and helping the individual bring their creative soul out into the world,” she said.

Edge lives in Oregon but decided to open the art studio in Monroe because she identified a need in the area. Through open studio times for families and a large home-school program during the day, she is reaching out to an increasing number of people in the community.

Her studio pioneered the Shakespeare Project, a drama workshop for youth that compares our modern culture with characters and topics in the works of William Shakespeare to combat themes of abuse and violence.

This year’s program will be held from 4 to 8 p.m. on Thursdays from March 8 until May 31, culminating in a performance by the kids at the Monroe Arts Center in May.

Participants will have the opportunity to work with actors from the American Players Theater on Friday, April 6 as well as attend a performance at the theater in Spring Green in June.

The Shakespeare Project has been supported by the Wisconsin Arts Board since its inception in 2005 and is open to children ages 10 to 18 years old. Applications are due by March 1 and more information is available at the Primitive Soul Art Studio, 325-5268, or at www.primitivesoulart.com.

Source:http://www.themonroetimes.com/m122part.htm

When Art Imitates Pain, It Can Help Heal,

When Art Imitates Pain, It Can Help Heal, a Therapy Group Finds – New York Times

When Art Imitates Pain, It Can Help Heal, a Therapy Group Finds
By ABEER ALLAM Published: July 14, 2005

The psychologist handed a painting by Frida Kahlo to a woman in a group therapy session for depression recently at a Brooklyn hospital.

“I want you to tell me what you see here,” the psychologist, María Sesín, said in Spanish. “What are you thinking about when you see this? How do you interpret it and relate it to your own lives?”

The woman, Cricelva Villicres, 52, started to cry. “This is a united
family,” she said. “I cannot identify with them. There was so much
violence and blood between my mother and father.”
  The painting, “My Parents, My Grandparents and I,” shows Kahlo as a naked child holding a blood-red ribbon connecting her to portraits of her parents and grandparents. The 11 women gathered around a long table at Lutheran Medical Center in Sunset Park took turns looking at it. When it was her turn, Vilma, who is 59, said: “It makes me feel very lonely. I have two children, but I am always alone. I do not have a family like this one.”

Vilma, who lives in Prospect Park, spoke on the condition that her last name not be used, to protect her privacy. The painting is one of 12 works by Kahlo that Dr. Sesín uses to treat Hispanic women who are suffering from depression, have been abused and have physical illnesses. The sessions are in Spanish, and the paintings help the women feel more comfortable discussing their traumatic experiences.

Continued here…
Note: you must register with the NewYork times first

Fading into the background

retardataire

Originally uploaded by (bobi & bobi).
Bobi & bobi is a French artist who captures feelings and impressions most wonderfully. This one titled Retardataire, to me is a wonderful representation of how it feels when we sense we are blending into our surroundings.

What do you think? Take a look at more of her art on Flickr.

Art goes completely postal

Envelope Collective Encourages Creation of Mail Art

Sent on their way: Envelope Collective received this writing mail art from an art therapy patient at the McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA

By Robyn Weiss

As the use of postal mail moves further toward becoming a lost practice, two College senior art majors are working to create a new perspective on the mail. Garrett Miller and Adam Morse recently began the Envelope Collective, an ongoing experiment that involves sending art, in envelope or other forms, through the mail.

“There aren’t really any rules [to the project],” said Morse. “But essentially what we ask is that you decorate an envelope, but not necessarily an envelope, because an envelope is a very ambiguous term, but send something — a letter, a box — through the mail.”

They encourage all people to become involved in the collective, calling for submissions in any form.

“You don’t have to be an artist to send something. People are so self-conscious about doing art, but anything is art,” said Miller. “It can be anonymous if you want, too. [Whatever you send is] art in itself.”

The two received sponsorship to set up a P.O. Box through the Oberlin post office as a place to receive submissions for the collective. At this point in the project, they have made a call for submissions through their website, which will eventually serve as an online gallery of the pieces that they receive.

“The greater cause is to make a series, a collection of the envelopes that come in and be able to auction them off to independent galleries and charities that are committed to spreading art in a positive way — for example, ones that would deliver art materials to those who don’t have the means, or artists affected by Katrina,” said Miller. “We don’t know where the project is going to go, other than seeing how the website goes and how the community itself responds to it.”

So far, the art community is responding very well. Last week, the Envelope Collective was featured on three popular websites. In addition to filled e-mail accounts, the actual P.O. Box is already beginning to fill as well. Though the project is based in Oberlin and they encourage local participation, their hopes are for the collective to become international.  Continued here: http://www.oberlin.edu/stupub/ocreview/2005/11/18/…

Born in a dancer’s therapy

January 9, 1998

ART REVIEW;

By ROBERTA SMITH

Art rarely strays far from life, from the feelings and character of the person who makes it. But sometimes it sticks so close to individual experience as to become a virtual shadow, different in substance but identical in outline.

This is the case with Marilee Stiles Stern, a 47-year-old American who lives in Seattle and is having her first solo show at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in SoHo. Well-known as a ballet dancer (she was discovered by George Balanchine), ballet teacher and choreographer, Ms. Stern turned to art as an aid in her psychotherapy, which followed a diagnosis in 1989 of dissociative identity disorder, as multiple-personality disorder is now called.

A few years later Ms. Stern became aware of the phenomenon of outsider or self-taught artists when her therapist showed her an issue of Raw Vision, an art magazine devoted to the subject, and she started acquiring back issues. Drawn to the art reproduced in the Kind Gallery’s ads in Raw Vision, Ms. Stern got in touch with Ms. Kind last February, asking the dealer to look at her work. In May Ms. Kind made a detour to Seattle on a trip to the West Coast and saw Ms. Stern’s work. A result is this exhibition of fantastical drawings in red, black and yellow felt-tip markers that Ms. Stern made on graph paper between 1989 and 1991. They depict swirling, cursive figures and figures-within-figures trapped inside intricately patterned backgrounds. They are almost as beautiful as they are harrowing.

Full of semi-abstract phalluses extravagantly rendered and repeated in ways that start out decorative and soon become startlingly explicit, these drawings seem to diagram encounters of a violent and sexual nature. Bound hands are a repeating motif, as are splayed bodies and stylized faces that can seem either dazed or screaming. Imbedded letters occasionally spell out words: ”Kill” or ”Please help me.” Rarely has violation been made so visually mesmerizing.

 

Continued here: http://query.nytimes.com

Art therapy helps child abuse victims

Moneycontrol India > News > Art therapy helps child abuse victims > >

Art therapy helps child abuse victims

2006-07-06 16:15

New Delhi:

Child abuse victims often find it hard to express their feelings. But something as simple as drawing a picture can be healing now. Researchers in Hong Kong have taken Art Therapy a step further by combining it with Virtual Reality.

An eleven-year-old boy was a victim of alleged physical and emotional abuse by relatives. He had become so aggressive that it became too much for his parents to handle him.

They ultimately turned to Art Therapist Julia Byrne for help. “He was very closed. Closed up both in body and emotion,” Byrne says.

Instead of traditional therapy, she’s treating him in the Virtual World. This form of therapy is called Smart Ambience Therapy, which is a high-tech program that blends Art Therapy and technology. “We have two cameras, one at the top and one at the side by. With these two cameras, we are able to calculate the three dimensional position of the human; his speed and his acceleration and his gesture,” Professor, City University of Hong Kong, Horace Ip says.

In this kind of
treatment a child is brought into an interactive, 3D environment, where
movements are transformed into colours on the screen

The activity may feel like a video game to
the child, but it’s a really safe place to express emotions. The
program is still in an experimental stage at City University of Hong
Kong but social workers say that it is promising.

“Through the play they can express
themselves. So this is really a good way to help them relax and engage,
and then start working on the problem,” HK Family Welfare Society,
social worker, Shirlay Tang says.

Experts also believe that this high tech approach to Art Therapy could also be used to treat trauma and phobias.

Amrita Tripathi

Source:  http://news.moneycontrol.com/india/newsarticle/stocksnews.php?autono=225472