The Top American Artists in the Art for Healing Genre: Matthew Brandt, Ed Carpenter, Sougwen Chung, Tracy Ellyn, Tom Shannon, Julie Tremblay and Breast Cancer Awareness Body Painting Project

The Top American Artists in the Art for Healing Genre: Matthew Brandt, Ed Carpenter, Sougwen Chung, Tracy Ellyn, Tom Shannon, Julie Tremblay and Breast Cancer Awareness Body Painting Project.

Mayo Clinic’s Extensive Art Collection – One of America’s Finest

While the primary mission of Mayo Clinic is excellence in patient care, its founders recognized that caring for the whole patient extends beyond treating the physical ailments. From its founding, Mayo has used art, architecture and beauty in surroundings to address the “spiritual” aspects of medical care and to create a healing environment. From Rodin and Miro, to Warhol and Chihuly, the collection represents a wide range of periods and places, and covers centuries of artistic expressions and styles. Rodin himself stated that he hoped that people who view his sculpture study for “The Burghers of Calais” (at Mayo and pictured here) would sense a kindred spirit with their own suffering and concerns. It is this spiritual connection that the arts provide which makes Mayo Clinic’s art collection so relevant.

Images: Mayo Clinic.

Harvard’s Dr. Jeremy Noble, Founder/President of Foundation for Art and Healing, Provides Initiatives for Art and Healing

The Foundation for Art and Healing explores the fundamental connection between art and the healing process, while providing active, ongoing support to communities and individuals. Their endeavors include exploration of the benefits of creative arts and storytelling in dealing with the physical and emotional demands of chronic illness. They have recently launched a clinical study at Boston Medical Center, partnering with leading biomedical researchers and award-winning playwright and professor Robbie McCauley, whose own experiences with diabetes led her down the creative path with her one-woman play, Sugar.

“From initiatives to address combat related PTSD, to tools for responding to tragedies like the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings and Boston Marathon Bombing, to helping women and children cope through the aftermath of the Van, Turkey earthquake, the Foundation for Art & Healing is making a very real impact with direct arts-based initiatives, empowering individuals and communities through creative expression.”

Dr. Nobel is on the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Their website can be found at www.artandhealing.org.

Event logo from Foundation for Art and Healing

Luminescent Transparent Layers by Tracy Ellyn, One of 7 Artists Selected as “The Top American Artists in the Art for Healing Genre”

Artist Tracy Ellyn suspends layer upon layer of her drawings, paintings, photography and writing into her oversized plexi installations, then hangs them as if they are floating from the wall. Each piece’s dense physicality can’t help but draw in the viewer and keep him or her engaged for extended periods of time. Yet, that same physicality has an intense lightness of being that helps to lift the spirit and emotions of the viewer, while simultaneously lifting the physicality of his or her illness from body and soul. Engaging and transforming are the two most potent effects of her art pieces.

The sheer beauty and universality of each piece is expressed in several eastern and western languages, lifting the viewer out of self and into a holistic healing world of prayer and meditation. As one travels through the nooks and crevices created by her mixed media textures, further layers of word and image can be found. It is as if one is on a journey, entering the healing light of each piece’s luminescence.

Tracy Ellyn’s website can be found at www.tracyellyn.com and her work followed at www.facebook.com/tracyellynfinearts.

Images from Tracy Ellyn’s “Refuah: The Art of Healing” series.

National Arts Policy Roundtable Publishes Need for Art in Healing Venues

“The country is so wounded, bleeding, and hurt right now. The country needs to be healed—it’s not going to be healed from the top, politically. How are we going to heal? Art is the healing force.” Robert Redford, National Arts Policy Roundtable 2012

Arts in health, healing, and wellness is a growing policy imperative and national need that is driven by several factors. In the United States, there is an aging population requiring significant long-term healthcare solutions coupled with unprecedented number of service members returning home with severe physical and psychological injuries. The Affordable Care Act is currently inspiring public debate in these areas. The end goal of incorporating the arts into health and healthcare is to provide quality, cost-effective services that achieve positive outcomes for patients, families, and caregivers. [Taken from Americans for the Arts 2012 Legislative Issue Brief: Arts in Health—Strengthening our Nation’s Health through the Arts.]

The Top American Artists in the Art for Healing Genre: Matthew Brandt, Ed Carpenter, Sougwen Chung, Tracy Ellyn, Tom Shannon, Julie Tremblay and Breast Cancer Awareness Body Painting Project

Over the next weeks, we will feature these top and upcoming inspiring artists’ works and stories. We will visit the aesthetic angle as well as the empirical angle, discussing what aspects of a variety of styles patients have been drawn to in multiple settings, how their minds and bodies reacted, and why their work should replace the dreaded white wall of the hospital or medical setting.

Photo: Julie Tremblay, Infinite, 2008

The American Journal of Public Health via the NIH provides summaries of both qualitative and quantitative research methods and results, describing categories of creative expression that have emerged as effective means of enhancing health and wellness.

Heather L. Stuckley, DEd and Jeremy Nobel, MD, MPH successfully explore the relationship between engagement with the arts and health outcomes. After just 20 minutes of exposure to the arts, monitors measured physiological values of heart rate, respiratory rate, myocardial oxygen demand and reduction in anxiety rates with those suffering from coronary heart disease. Other diseases such as cancer were also studied with positive outcomes. They note that medical professionals are finally recognizing the role that creative arts play in the healing process. Read this fascinating study at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2804629/

“Art is sometimes most needed where you don’t expect to find it. Hospitals are places where joy and sorrow meet, where people quickly reset values, and where human existence is peeled off layers of superficiality. This is what makes it so pure and essential.” -Dr. Iva Fattorini, Cleveland Clinic

This is a powerful read on how the arts not only show empirically to affect health, but also how neuroimmunology is bidirectional, and the body, mind and spirit of not just the patient, but caregiver and staff are at stake. Article by Dr. Iva Fattorini, Cleveland Clinic.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/iva-fattorini/arts-and-medicine-do-it_b_5526700.html
Photo: Cleveland Clinic Arts and Medicine