Near the end of the Spring semester, Val Sereno’s second year Community Access Through the Arts class visited Material for the Arts in Long Island City.

From their website: Founded in 1978, Materials for the Arts, a part of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, provides thousands of NYC’s arts and cultural organizations, public schools, and community arts programs with the supplies they need to run and expand their programs. MFTA gathers materials from companies and individuals that no longer need them and makes them available, for free, to the artists and educators that do. In the process, hundreds of tons are removed from the waste stream every year and kept out of landfills, which helps sustain our environment, promotes reuse, and reduces waste. MFTA helps artists realize their visions, provides students with a richer educational experience and furnishes businesses and individuals with a simple and efficient way to enhance the cultural life of their city.

Our MPS students received a tour of the facility by Education Director John Kaiser, who also gave an overview of the organization’s goals and mission. He then led students in an art-making workshop where they created either hand-made books or talking sticks.

More information about current events and activities can be found at the MFTA blog. Thanks to MFTA for allowing us access to their space.

On Friday, April 19, the MPS Art Therapy Department’s Class of 2013 conducted its Thesis Presentations at the National Arts Club in NYC.

During the course of their training, students explored theoretical perspectives and clinical applications of art therapy. The integration of their work culminated in the research and writing of a master’s thesis. Presentations were organized following a developmental perspective from early childhood, through adolescence, and ending with adults. Through this lens students were able to highlight what is possible in the application of art therapy with people at different stages of life and with varying life experiences. Each thesis took a unique perspective reflecting the diversity and complexity of human experience, the individual interest of each graduate art therapy student and the broad scope of art therapy practice.

Class of 2013 Students and Thesis Topics:

Bethany Altschwager: The Role of the Digital in Art Therapy with School-Aged Children

Ann Ellen Goodstein: Puppet Making: Empowering Children, A View Through Current Perspectives in Humanistic Psychology

Paget Walker: Shared States of Consciousness: How Children Make Meaning with Parents with a Mental Illness

Mary Budd: Art Therapy in the Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

Hina Suri: Fusion Beads as an Impetus towards Higher Forms of Artistic Expression

Esther Bleier: The Impact of Complex Trauma on Adolescence

Cara Mellea: “We’re not Homeless, we’re just misplaced”: Art Therapy in a Relief Shelter Following Hurricane Sandy

Francesca Cangeloso: Working Towards a Common Goal: Integrating Art Therapy into a Pediatric Hospital

Arianna Villarreal: Art Therapy and Giving Back  Back

Mona Luisa Diogo: iFeel: The New Therapeutic Language of the Techno-Digital Age

Kelly Merriam: Brief Sensory Based Art Therapy Interventions with At-Risk Adolescents

Sophia Saad: Art Therapy with Adolescents with Visual Impairments and Blindness

Jacqueline Tassiello: The use of Short Term Art Therapy in the Emergency Department

AhnHee Strain: Using My Senses, I Explore: The Process and Interactions between Sensory Materials and Adults with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD)

Jennifer Wainstock: Artwork as a Reflection of Hidden Shame: Working with a Homosexual Young Man

Reilly Ingham: Art Therapy with Women in Recovery

Heather Montemarano: Incorporating Relaxation Techniques in Psychiatric Inpatient Art Therapy

Joshua Intrator: The Creative Process as a Metaphor for Empowerment: Working with an Artistically Inclined Client

A reception was held for family and friends in the National Arts Club’s Sculpture Court immediately following the presentations.

Thanks to Thesis Project instructors Eileen McGann and Lisa Furman, and congratulations to the Class of 2013!

This video is a recording of the process of creating a painting The mind is a universe. Although not created in the context of art therapy, it is an exploration of recording the artistic process, which is also relevant to art therapy. In art therapy, both the product and the process are considered important. Often, a painting or a sculpture goes through changes and transformations before it is considered finished. Revisiting this process can help the artist/client with personal meaning making and insights. Whereas the artwork can be revisited over time, in the past, the process of creating it was only retained in verbal descriptions.

Today, when appropriate, a video camera or iPhone/iPad can be used to record the process of art making in art therapy and/or to create a video installation. Video has been used by contemporary artists for decades to create works of art. Many of our clients are familiar and experienced with video cameras, iPods and iPhones, and art therapists can add these media to their methods of working with clients. Using video in art therapy offers us a unique opportunity to explore and relive the process of art making.
________________________________________________________________________________

Victoria Scotti is an alumnus of the MPS Art Therapy program at SVA and is currently in her first year in the PhD in Creative Arts Therapies program at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Through lectures, examples and exercises, the course covered creative thinking in an individual’s personal and professional life as well as addressed tools and techniques to help overcome challenges and improve creativity. Some of the topics discussed were how to discover your creative strengths, work through setbacks, and the importance of resilience. Participants traveled from places like Oslo, Mexico City, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles to attend the course.

Creativity myths were debunked as well. For example: Myth#1:  the smarter you are, the more creative you are. In fact, intelligence correlates with creativity only to a point.  Myth #2: Creativity is a solitary act. Studies show that a very high percentage of the world’s most important breakthroughs are products of collaboration among groups of people with complementary skills.  Myth #3: The young are more creative than the old.  Age is not a clear predictor of creative potential. It takes 7-10 years to build up deep expertise in a given field.

The importance of divergent and convergent thinking was thoroughly discussed. Both are important and a break-down of some of the differences is shown in the following slides. What do creative people do?

Preparation/Saturation/Incubation/Illumination/Verification
Through preparation/saturation they immerse themselves in whatever they are trying to figure out.  Read everything on the topic and learn as much as possible.  Incubation they find it is helpful to take a step away from whatever the problem or challenge is, or to “sleep on it”. Illumination/verification is the enlightened moment and  verification is time to test it.

Val will be imparting this knowledge to students in the courses she teaches, Community Access Through the Arts and Multicultural Issues in Art Therapy, as many of the inspiring strategies that were presented are learnable skills.

Eileen McGann (ATR-BC, LCAT, SVA Faculty) led the conference panel discussion

Savneet Talwar , PhD, is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has also taught at George Washington University, Southern Illinois University, and the St. Louis Institute of Art Psychotherapy.  Talwar’s Teaching Statement directly relates to the focus of this year’s conference: “… I investigate contemporary American culture and systems of meaning as they relate to art therapy practice and pedagogy. By taking an interdisciplinary approach and stressing a critical intersectional perspective that takes full account of race, class, gender and sexuality, as I try to enrich art therapy practice. In my teaching and research, I explore the construction of identity and difference, focusing on identity formation and its place in human development from a socio-cultural perspective…”

Savneet Talwar speaking during the panel discussion

Teju Cole is a writer, art historian, street photographer, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College, whose novel Open City has become a recommended reading in therapy and creative therapy fields. Open City has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, and the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. Contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, Qarrtsiluni, the Atlantic, Granta, Aperture, Transition, A Public Space, and is a contributing editor at the New Inquiry.

Cole concluded his presentation with the story of Sonali Deraniyagala and her memoir Wave. Deraniyagala lost her husband, parents and two young sons in the tsunami of 2004.

Jennifer Christine Nash , PhD, is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. Nash’s work focuses on black feminism, black sexual politics, race and visual culture, and race and law. To date, her research has centered on two related areas:  first, she has studied representations of black bodies in visual culture, with a particular interest in sexualized images of black female bodies. Second, she has written about black feminism as an intellectual and political tradition, focusing on intersectionality and, more recently, on black feminism’s love-politics.

Nash discussing the work of artist Renee Cox

Pablo Helguera, PhD, is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance, is Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction. His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record.

Helguera and team of Ælia Media, a participatory art project for Bologna

The afternoon concluded with a reception and a chance to connect with students, alumni, speakers and colleagues in the lobby of the SVA Theatre.

Frst-year student scholarships are also awarded at this annual event. Department Chair Deborah Farber, ATR-BC, LCAT, presented several scholarships– the Estelle Bellomo Award for Excellence in Art Therapy, the Ray Levine Annual Scholarship Award, and departmental Merit Awards– to exceptional first-year students Suzanne Deisher, Javere Pinnock, Shelby Kanaly, Charlie Drake and Ingrid Mellor.

It was an exciting evening for the MPS Art Therapy students and the clients they work with.

Liz DelliCarpini, SVA faculty and curator of the spring exhibit, speaks with guest

MPS Art Therapy student Courtney Kates

MPS students Jessie Leete, Laney Wallace, and Stephanie Feinberg

MPS Students Ingrid Mellor, Charlie Drake and Javere Pinnock

MPS Art Therapy students Ann Goodstein and Paget Walker with faculty Stephanie Gorski

Debi Farber, Chair of the MPS Art Therapy Department, speaks with guests

Marc, Kevyn and Jeffrey Levine standing beside the photo for the Ray Levine Scholarship

MPS Art Therapy Student Kelly Merriam

Suzanne Deisher, recipient of the Estelle Bellomo Scholarship Award, with Eileen and Patrice Bellomo

MPS Art Therapy students AhnHee Strain, Jacqueline Tassiello, and Mary Budd

MPS Art Therapy students Hina Suri and Arianna Villarreal

MPS Art Therapy student Jennifer Russo with faculty Robert Grant

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “Through the Looking Glass” an exhibition of selected work by students in the MPS Art Therapy Department and the clients they work with at their internship sites. The exhibition will be on view from February 9 – March 9, 2013 at the Westside Gallery, at 141 West 21^st Street, New York City.

Being truly seen by another, feeling a sense of belonging, inclusion, and purpose in the world, is a basic human need and the focus of this exhibition. Here, the art therapist’s role is recognizing, highlighting, and expanding client strengths. The gallery is viewed as an extension of traditional therapeutic space, providing the artists with an opportunity to be seen in a different context and to step outside of restricting identities. This can be quite empowering, allowing one to realize unseen capacities and connect to society in novel ways.

Student work is displayed with client work to illustrate this communication between client, therapist and viewer. Students work at internships at Bronx Lebanon Hospital, Riker’s Island, The Foundling Hospital, FEGS, Montefiore Medical Center and Hudson Guild, as well as many others in and around the New York City area.

Here is a sneak peak inside the gallery:

Kaitlin Shideler

Mary Budd

Kate DeRaffele

Jacqueline Tassiello

The MPS Art Therapy Department at the School of Visual Arts,

in conjunction with The Visual Arts Foundation, announces our

28^th Annual

Art Therapy Conference

Perception of Identity Through Art:

How Narrative and Perspective Shape Understanding

Friday, March 15, 2013, 8:30am-4pm

The Department’s annual conference will feature speakers from diverse backgrounds who will discuss how social, cultural, and personal viewpoints impact perception and art therapy practice.

Special Guest Presenters:

Savneet Talwar

Teju Cole

Panel Discussion:

Savneet Talwar, Teju Cole,

Jennifer Christine Nash, Pablo Helguera,

and Eileen McGann

SVA Theatre

333 West 23 Street, New York, NY 10011

Registration:

To register or for more information, please email

arttherapy@sva.edu, or call 212.592.2610

General Public: $75

SVA alumni: $50

Non-SVA Students: $20

SVA MPS Art Therapy Alumni, SVA On-site Supervisors, SVA students, faculty & staff: FREE

Please tell us which of the above you are when you register.

All proceeds from the conference will go to the Ray Levine

Art Therapy Scholarship Fund of the Visual Arts Foundation.

Please make checks or money orders payable to:

The School of Visual Arts

and mail them to the Art Therapy Department,

School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23 Street, NYC, 10010.

Attendees may also register for the event by email and pay at the door.

Check, money order, and credit card accepted at the door, but not cash.

4 CEC’s available for ATR-BCs

__________________________________________________

Conference Schedule

8:30-9:30am

Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:30-9:45am

Opening Statements

9:45-10:45am

Savneet Talwar, PhD

Associate Professor of Art Therapy,

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

10:45-11am

Morning Break

11am-12pm

Teju Cole

Writer, art historian, street photographer,

Distinguished Writer in Residence, Bard College

12-1:30pm

Lunch Break

1:30-3pm

Panel Discussion

Savneet Talwar and Teju Cole will be joined by

Jennifer Christine Nash, PhD (Assistant Professor of American Studies, The George Washington University) and Pablo Helguera (Artist, Educator, Director of Adult and Academic Programs at the Museum of Modern Art) for a panel discussion addressing Perception of Identity Through Art. Eileen McGann (ATR-BC, LCAT, SVA Faculty) will moderate the panel.

3-4pm

Reception in the lobby of the SVA Theatre

__________________________________________________

Information about the Presenters

Savneet Talwar

Savneet Talwar is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has also taught at George Washington University, Southern Illinois University, and the St. Louis Institute of Art Psychotherapy. Her full Teaching/Administrative and Clinical Experience as well as a list of her research, publications and presentations can be viewed on her website.

Savneet Talwar

Talwar’s Teaching Statement: My teaching relates directly to my research and scholarship. In them, I investigate contemporary American culture and systems of meaning as they relate to art therapy practice and pedagogy. By taking an interdisciplinary approach and stressing a critical intersectional perspective that takes full account of race, class, gender and sexuality, as I try to enrich art therapy practice. In my teaching and research, I explore the construction of identity and difference, focusing on identity formation and its place in human development from a socio-cultural perspective. I am interested in processes of change that occur within the therapeutic relationship as they relate to individuals, groups and in community based settings.

http://www.savneetalwar.com/

Teju Cole

Teju Cole, writer, art historian, street photographer, was born in the US to Nigerian parents, raised in Nigeria, and lives in Brooklyn. Author of two books, a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, and a novel, Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, and the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. Contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, Qarrtsiluni, the Atlantic, Granta, Aperture, Transition, A Public Space, and is a contributing editor at the New Inquiry. Currently at work on a book-length non-fiction narrative of Lagos, and on a Twitter project called small fates.

Photo Credit: Teju Cole

http://www.tejucole.com/
https://twitter.com/tejucole
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tejucole/

The White-Savior Industrial Complex: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/

Video Interview from WYNC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8Qf0Iohtos

Lectures at Harvard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOq2HWveVok http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s14h5EWB7k

Jennifer Christine Nash

Jennifer Christine Nash is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. Nash’s work focuses on black feminism, black sexual politics, race and visual culture, and race and law. To date, her research has centered on two related areas:  first, she has studied representations of black bodies in visual culture, with a particular interest in sexualized images of black female bodies. Second, she has written about black feminism as an intellectual and political tradition, focusing on intersectionality and, more recently, on black feminism’s love-politics. She held fellowships at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows. Her research has also been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies.

Jennifer Christine Nash

http://departments.columbian.gwu.edu/americanstudies/people/155

Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction. His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record.

Helguera performed individually at the Museum of Modern Art /Gramercy Theater, in 2003, where he showed his work “Parallel Lives”. His musical composition, “Endingness” has been performed  by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; ICA Boston;  RCA London; 8th Havana Biennal, PERFORMA 05, Havana; Shedhalle, Zurich; MoMA P.S.1, New York; Brooklyn Museum; IFA Galerie, Bonn; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; MALBA museum in Buenos Aires, Ex-Teresa Espacio Alternativo in Mexico City, The Bronx Museum, Artist Space, and Sculpture Center, amongst many others. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, The New York Times, ArtNews, amongst others. In 2008 he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and also was the recipient of a 2005Creative Capital Grant. In 2011 he was named winner of the International Award of Participatory Art of the Region Emilia-Romagna in Italy.

Pablo Helguera

Helguera has worked since 1991 in a variety of contemporary art museums, most recently as head of public programs at the Education department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998-2005). Since 2007, he is Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has organized close to 1000 public events in conjunction with nearly 100 exhibitions. In 2010 he was appointed pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which took place in September, 2011. He is currently Senior Resident of Location One in New York. He will be presenting a solo exhibition at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 2012.

http://pablohelguera.net/

http://creativetime.org/summit/2012/10/12/pablo-helguera/

During this past Fall 2012 semester, second year students in the MPS Art Therapy program’s Multicultural Issues in Art Therapy class visited the Museum of Arts and Design to view the Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3/Contemporary Native North American Art from the Northeast and Southeast exhibition.

The field trip was used as a springboard for students to construct an art piece, a visual narrative reflecting their own culture, family history, and upbringing. Some examples of the work are found below.

Reilly Ingham

Hina Suri

Sophia Saad

Francesca Cangeloso

Jacqueline Tassiello

Course instructor Val Sereno, ATR-BC, LCAT, described the assignment as an opportunity for students to explore their own cultural identities, combined with the exploration of a social issue that had been discussed during the semester. The final work could be in any medium, telling the story the student wished to convey. To help the students create work with depth and meaning they viewed work that had examples of artists’ reactions to being oppressed and marginalized. From this the students were able to visually learn as well as create dynamic pieces for their final project, and incorporate artmaking as a way to demonstrate understanding of concepts.

As the semester came to a close, students had three months of Methods & Materials workshops behind them. The last week of class, they readily took on working with plaster and stone.