The Colors of the Void

"We are chronicling the link between how we memorialize collective history and how we experience personal history, how silence and suffering in one realm may reproduce silence in the other. Authoritarian structures in the family and individual mirror those in the political world. Amnesia in the political realm can reinforce silencing in personal life. The retrieval of memory and self-expression through the arts can disrupt such a system."   -Watkins & Shulman Art can be used to share feelings and emotions, explanations when words fail us, but it can also be used to create change within lives and within society. Art is often moving in a way that explanation is not. It creates emotion within us and leads us to a sense of empathy that otherwise might have escaped us. - Which in turn can often bring humans together in the name of a cause, in the name of change.  When I consider art that was intended to bring change, I consider a lot of the ads from my childhood. I consider bi...

 "There are numerous references within medicine, anthropology, and the arts to the earliest healing applications of expressive modalities. For example, the Egyptians are reported to have encouraged people with mental illness to engage in artistic activity (Fleshman & Fryrear, 1981); the Greeks used drama and music for its reparative properties (Gladding, 1992); and the story of King Saul in the Bible describes music’s calming attributes. Later, in Europe during the Renaissance, English physician and writer Robert Burton theorized that imagination played a role in health and well-being, while Italian philosopher de Feltre proposed that dance and play were central to children’s healthy growth and development (Coughlin, 1990)" - Cathy A. Malchoidi      It seems as though, without even meaning to, our species has found art, music, drama, and dance as ways to communicate feelings for which we had no real words or no words of our own to present. Before we knew it was ...

 "Every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination, and have their source in what one is pleased to call infantile fantasy. Not the artist alone, but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." - Jung, 1921 Last week, we explored the idea of art as therapy. In particular, we placed a great deal of emphasis on whether art as therapy should be made readily available to the masses or whether it should fall under some realm of control, IE, under the guidance of a therapist or other mental health professional. I was in the grouping that agreed that it should be made available to anyone who was interested or who might benefi...