Randy M. Vick

Utilizing Prestructured Art Elements in Brief Group Art Therapy with Adolescents

Over the past two decades there has been a steady decrease in the average length of stay in mental health programs, and this phenomenon has necessitated changes in how art therapy services are delivered. This paper presents strategies for utilizing six different prestructured art elements (magazine pictures, magazine words, photocopied images, cut and torn paper, traced shapes, and partial drawings) as a means of addressing these trends. Short-term, adolescent, and group treatment sources are reviewed along with literature on projective assessment and art therapy approaches. Brief case examples from an adolescent partial hospitalization program are presented to illustrate the points, and general practice principles are discussed.

Ethics on Exhibit

Abstract This article discusses ethical questions raised by an exhibition of work by an artist with a history of mental illness and the exhibitions relevance to art therapy and “outsider art” discourse on the subject. Considerations for how such an exhibit could be handled had the circumstances included an art therapist and art therapy client are examined. Current ethical practices are discussed along with suggestions for professional involvement of art therapists in public art exhibitions.

The Dimensions of Service: An Elemental Model for the Application of Art Therapy

AbstractThis article presents the “Dimensions of Service” model as a tool for examining where, how, and why art therapists offer their services. Ten aspects central to art therapy practice (context, nomenclature, realm of need, role, conceptual model, purpose, level of function, length of contact, age range, and groupings) are outlined along with reflections on their potential impact on individual practitioners as well as on the profession as a whole. This model was developed out of the authors experience as an art therapy clinician, administrator, and educator and may be useful both to students entering the field and professionals reassessing their current career paths and previously held strategies for the delivery of professional services.

Virtual reality environment assisting recovery from stroke

Our virtual environment represents the pre-clinical phase of an ongoing research project using a pneumatically actuated glove, head/arm tracking, and a head mounted display to facilitate hand rehabilitation in stroke survivors. This is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago involving a team of engineers, researchers, occupational therapists, art therapists and virtual reality artists.

A Review of “Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow”: by Laurie Wilson. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2016, 506 pp., 22 color plates, 76 black & white ills.,

As an inveterate collector of abandoned wooden objects, I have long felt an affinity for the art of Louise Nevelson. Her trademark assemblages created from scavenged furniture and architectural fragments have become unmistakable icons of 20th-century art. The corner of a picture frame, some Victorian gingerbread, a table leg—all seem inconsequential in the eyes of many, but when transformed by Nevelson, something magical happens. Painted black and hanging in a museum, these sculptures have an air of mystery, but Laurie Wilson’s new biography Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow brings insight into the fascinating life of the woman behind the art. Nevelson’s sculptures were assembled bit by bit and I can envision her turning over each one in her hands, considering their form and optimal placement. I imagine the author engaging in a similar process, taking each element of her research and crafting it into this sensitive portrait of the artist. Dr. Wilson is an Honorary Life Member of the American Art Therapy Association as well as a psychoanalyst, art historian, artist, and educator. These interconnected disciplines come together beautifully in this engaging biography. Wilson’s multilayered background puts her in an ideal position to explore the life of this giant of the art world. The author’s professional profile calls to mind Ernst Kris (1952), who combined his training as a psychoanalyst and art historian to write a postmortem analysis of the sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Concerns that Wilson’s book is filled with overreaching interpretations and Freudian jargon would be misplaced, however. Her clinical knowledge informs the narrative but does not dominate it. Nevelson’s self-doubt, depression, and alcohol use are acknowledged but are not focused on; this is not a case study. As with her previous book on Alberto Giacometti (Wilson, 2003), Wilson is the consummate scholar. Her 40 years of research on Nevelson included consulting hundreds of publications and interviewing dozens of family members, friends, gallerists, collectors, and artist colleagues. Unlike Kris (whose subject had been dead for 150 years), Wilson was able to have multiple meetings with Nevelson herself. This incredible effort has resulted in a publication that is deep (there are 45 pages of endnotes) as well as authentic. A good biography presents an orderly chronology of the history of the subject and this one tracks Nevelson’s amazing life and career through 20 chapters that cover discrete periods of time. Chapter 1 begins with a story that within days of her birth (as Leah Berliawsky), the well-known writer of Yiddish folktales Sholem Aleichem remarked that the baby was “destined for greatness” (p. 13). This unlikely prophecy became both family legend and dramatic reality. Because of the hostility toward Jews in the Ukraine, the Berliawsky family immigrated to the United States in 1900 and settled in Rockland, Maine. This began an odyssey that would take Nevelson from Maine to New York and ultimately to the art capitals of the world. As any good dynamic therapist would, the author presents details of her subject’s family of origin and upbringing with the understanding that these early life experiences put an indelible stamp on things to come. Even as a young child, Louise was artistic and strong-willed. As a tall, Jewish girl in a predominantly Yankee town, she felt ostracized, a pain that would remain for much of her life, but this rejection would fuel her desire to excel and be unique. In subsequent chapters the reader is witness to the gradual unfolding of the artist and person of Louise Nevelson. As an unhappy wife and mother in the 1920s, she found ways to study art through lessons and travel in the 1930s. At the beginning there were no role models for a woman artist, but she pioneered ways of working that ultimately led to international recognition. As her art evolved, so, too, did the persona that we now associate with this art diva. The wild clothing, colorful headgear, and lavish makeup (including multiple sets of false eyelashes) became so associated with her that her friend, the playwright Edward Albee, called her look “The Nevelson” (p. 349). This presentation was at once personal expression, publicity stunt, and façade. At times it was also a distraction, as when reviewers focused more on her eccentric style than on her art. The theme of what is real and what is artifice is returned to throughout this book. Nevelson’s mature works, whether in wood or steel, are all about positive and negative space accented by reflection and darkness. The critic Hilton Kramer commented in a review of her work, “One must really enter the shadows here before one can see” and the artist took to calling herself an “architect of shadow” (p. 175). Wilson’s subtitle—light and shadow—refers to this phenomenon at both the formal and psychological level. The exploration of the relationship between form and content is one of my favorite aspects of the book. It is central to art therapy and what makes this particular biography so special. Sadly, the systematic examination that both historical art and psychoanalytic methods can offer has become increasingly rare in art therapy. I have long admired Wilson’s elegant handling of this type of material (in her writing and presentations) and no one currently in our field does it better.

39.95 hardcover, ISBN: 978-0500094013

overarching theory that would predict how any given artist would produce his art following brain damage” (p. 213). Her conclusions are that creativity has diffuse functional representation in the brain. There are several drawbacks of Zaidel’s approach to the neuropsychology of art. Her approach is reductive in that changes seen in an artist’s work are addressed as being based on the damaged areas of the brain. The creation of artwork is a multilayered process over a period of time, and as such involves multiple cortical and subcortical functions that reflect the sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and intuitions of the artist, including the motor activity to transduce these into external images. Zaidel, however, refers to the basic visual expressive elements that reflect the creative process—forms, shapes, even patterns—as graphic “primitives” (p. 24) or “primitives in visual arts” (p. 201). The author’s small sample of art was created only by established professional artists who had experienced brain damage. This is very limiting, given that art and visual expression can be seen on a continuum, from recognized “Art” (with a capital A) to art by less recognized artists to creative visual expression and communication by non-artists. The focus on established professional artists with brain damage highlights another shortcoming in Zaidel’s approach, namely that the records of the artists’ brain damage are global and incomplete, especially if seen from the perspective of contemporary methods of investigating brain activity (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalogram, etc.). Zaidel also shortchanges a major component involved in creating artwork, namely imagery, which is mentioned only briefly in the book. Kosslyn, Ganis, and Thompson’s (2001) “bottom-up” approach to visual imagery conceptualized it as a visual representation from our memory system, which is collated throughout the visual cortex via a progressive sequence of its basic elements. I agree with Frigg and Howard (2011) who asserted that this framework provides a more solid basis for understanding the brain processes concomitant to creating art than Zaidel’s “top-down” approach gleaned from the work of established artists who had experienced brain damage. For art therapists the book offers information about the effects of differential hemispheric damage on artists and their work and also provides references to many studies that address the different aspects covered in the book. This information, however, is presented piecemeal throughout the book instead of in a sequentially organized manner. A second edition of the book is presently in the planning stages by the publisher.

Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey From Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph

In this session, short presentations about well-established and exemplary practices in school settings (kindergarten through twelfth-grade) sparked small-group discussions about how artistic inquiries can enrich learning experiences, including in institutional contexts challenged by sometimes constrained ways of conceptualizing learning and assessment. What are we learning about art as a way of knowing in the formal educational context, and how can this inform work in the informal context?

Art is a Way of Knowing

AbstractThis article is based on an interview with Don Seiden—artist, educator, and regional pioneer in the field of art therapy practice and training in the Midwest. A personal account of his career path features ground-breaking work with two very different institutions and the training program which grew out of his connections to both. Reflections on historical developments in the field are followed by thoughts on future trends in the profession. Central to the conversation is the theme of the unique perspective artists can bring to the fields of mental health and science by their ability to sort and combine information and bring order out of chaos.