Exploration 2: Arts-Based Research

a picture is worth a thousand words

Only months after my grandfather passed away, our family started to notice signs of dementia in my grandmother’s behavior. They were small at first: misplaced milk in the cabinet and forgotten hair appointments. Simple things, really, that are easily attributed to old age. Eventually, her “forgetfulness” could not be overlooked. Open flames left on the stovetop, cigarettes left burning in the ashtray, and the doors unlocked and ajar forced us all to take a closer look at the once spirited and independent matriarch of our family. She was clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1999. Her decline was slow. Her short-term memory was the first to go. She seemed to have no memories from after my grandfather’s death. Her personality calmed and the feisty opinionated woman we all knew seemed to disappear behind the sweet quiet smile of this new person. Many people did not even know she had dementia. She was amiable and carried on conversations with ease. Only those who really knew her or spent long periods of time with her could recognize holes in her stories or repetitive speech. I was one of the few people she remembered. Possibly because she was an integral part of my childhood. She first introduced me to art. I still cherish her box of paints and brushes. She taught me how to explore the world around me through those very tools. She drew upon my own talents and shared her love of painting. In her dementia, she forgot this love.

But maybe she didn't have to....

Growing research has illuminated the positive connection between the arts and dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s disease. While there is no cure, many find their voice, their normalcy, and their connectivity through interacting with art. 

Meet Me, the MoMA Alzheimer’s Project, was created in order to serve the growing population affected by Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.  Through specialized tours, participants and their caregivers are given opportunity to connect, dialogue, observe, interpret, and create works of art.

Meet Me provides a safe and nurturing environment for people in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease or dementia to look at and talk about selected pieces within the MoMA collection. The program extends the experience to include art making in a classroom setting and is not limited to two-dimensional art. Music, ballroom dancing, poetry, and other hands-on experiences are offered as extensions of the program as well. Men and women meet once a month in small private groups reserved especially for participants in the program. Trained museum educators move with the groups throughout the galleries engaging with the art in a predetermined sequence. Participants engage with the works of art, the educator, each other, and their caregivers to find meaning, reminisce, explore self, develop connections, and create positive experiences. The facilitator (museum educator) plays a vital role in creating a safe environment in which participants feel at ease to contribute. According to a study of the program by NYU, the intellectual stimulation, social interaction and emotional carryover has made a statistically significant difference in the lives of participants.

Meet Me seems to have been designed to utilize the arts-based research subcategory Arts-inquiry to offer participants a space to move comfortably through the process of understanding themselves and finding a voice. As quoted in Karen Keifer-Boyd's Arts-based Research as Social Justice Activism, it is through this voice that "ideas, emotions, and experiences are critically analyzed and made public" (Keifer-Boyd, 2011, p. 4). Participating in art viewing, interpreting, and creating stimulates the senses, triggers dormant memories and gives participants an opportunity to articulate themselves. Dementia patients are not only trying to connect with those around them, they are trying to reconnect with themselves. Their sense of identity may have been loss or seems to be slipping away. Meet Me provides a way for them to explore and see the changing world around them from a familiar place. “Arts-based inquiry is a reconstitution of self in the act of learning about lives in which the personal is understood and contextualized as political.” (Keifer-Boyd, 9). Through arts-inquiry dementia patients are able to participate in self analysis. This autoethnography, articulated through observing or creating art, provides the tools necessary to “explain self to others” (Keifer-Boyd, 2011, 9). The ability to "explain self" can be incredibly liberating to participants as problems with language and abstract thinking are common effects of dementia.  

Arts-based research "involves continual critical reflexivity in response to injustice" (Keifer-Boyd, 2011, p 3). Programs, such as Meet Me, have forced institutions like MoMA to take a closer look at how they make the arts accessible to all of their patrons especially those that are traditionally marginalized. The development and dissemination of The MoMA Alzheimer's Project to museums and organizations across the country exhibits this community's "commitment to social transformation, challenging power relations, showing solidarity, recognizing and using emotions, being the change you want to see, and building space for critical dialogue"(Chatterton, Fuller, & Routledge, 2007, p. 222 as quoted in Keifer-Boyd, 2011, p. 6). 

Problem Statement: While the students I teach do not suffer from dementia, many are searching to find a voice. Each of my courses consists of high school students new to the college experience, traditional students utilizing the online component of UA's educational system, and non-traditional students pursuing their degrees remotely. In my virtual classroom, students interact asynchronously mostly through text. The purpose of my focused arts-based action research is to explore and implement visual tools and technologies such as Voice Thread and avatars to encourage students to "find their voice" within the context of my course. By interpreting (reinterpreting) themselves through the art we study, students will begin to discover, explore and develop their own voice. Additionally, as students interact with one another they will begin to identify with their peers and work and move more synchronously through their virtual experience.  

Finding Voice Concept Map

Resources:

http://www.moma.org/meetme/index

94-Year-Old Seattle Alzheimer's Patient Discovers New Artistic Talent. (n.d.). Retrieved February 6, 2014, from http://kuow.org/post/94-year-old-seattle-alzheimers-patient-discovers-new-artistic-talent

Art Therapy for Alzheimer’s. (n.d.). ALZinfo.org. Retrieved February 6, 2014, from https://www.alzinfo.org/05/articles/prevention-and-wellness-21

Fields, J., & Lemonick, M. (n.d.). The Woman With No Memory. Time. Retrieved from http://science.time.com/2013/10/24/the-woman-with-no-memory/

Grady, D. (2006, October 24). Self-Portraits Chronicle a Descent Into Alzheimer’s. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/health/24alzh.html

Keifer-Boyd, K. (2011). Arts-based research as social justice activism: Insight, inquiry, imagination, embodiment, relationality. International Review of Qualitative Research, 5(1), 3-19.

Rankin, K. P., Liu, A. A., Howard, S., Slama, H., Hou, C. E., Shuster, K., & Miller, B. L. (2007). A case-controlled study of altered visual art production in Alzheimer’s and FTLD. Cognitive and behavioral neurology: official journal of the Society for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology, 20(1), 48–61. doi:10.1097/WNN.0b013e31803141dd

Why Art Therapy is Good for the Alzheimer’s Brain. (n.d.-a). Senior Living News and Trends | A Place for Mom. Retrieved February 7, 2014, from http://www.aplaceformom.com/blog/2013-10-31-art-therapy-good-for-brain/