Hello, everyone!
Yesterday I attended Mount Mary University's Spring Art Therapy Symposium and had such a great experience! I wanted to write about the things I attended and also just review the conference as a whole. Overall, this was a great conference. I feel like I learned a lot and I left all of the sessions that I attended just feeling really excited that this is my field.
Mount Mary's campus is gorgeous. It did make me feel like a kid in church since it's a catholic university so that was interesting but the buildings were really stunning.
My sweet friend K and I drove up to Milwaukee after class on Thursday (I love car trips so this was great!). We pretty much just talked the whole time. We stayed with a lovely family we found via Airbnb. Driving though Illinois at sunset was gorgeous. Even though I've lived in the midwest for a few years now I still can't get over the sunsets or just the sky in general, I've never seen so much of either before moving here.
Creative Collective Action | Holly Feen-Calligan | Keynote
So Holly is from Detroit and her presentation was about service learning projects for art therapy students in Detroit and how participating in service learning is hugely beneficial to both the students and the organizations that participate. She was really interesting to listen to and kind of got my community arts brain fired up. Some research she shared that I put in my notes was "Service learning facilitates multicultural skills or intercultural experiences (Backos & Sanders, 2015) and contributes to professional identity. She shared a quote at the end that I loved, I didn't catch who she was quoting though. "Movements aren't born of critical mass, but critical movement."
Art-Making as Resistance Against Oppression | E. Hlavek | Workshop
This workshop was essentially about the presenter's research. She was in the doctoral program at Mount Mary. So her research was studying art work made in concentration camps and ghettos during the Holocaust. This was an extremely powerful and intense thing to hear about but it also felt really important. The presenter started out by sharing that there were 4 categories of cultural resistance against oppression and then talked about each one. The categories were resistance against annihilation, resistance against dehumanization, resistance against propaganda, and resistance against future genocides.
Elizabeth, the presenter, went through each of the 4 categories and we looked at artwork that was representative of each one. This was very interesting and also heartbreaking. In the first cateogory, resistance against annihilation, we mainly looked at portraits. Each portrait had a great deal of detail and line work that would have taken a very long time. They were intricate and graceful. The same detail was not at all present in subject's clothing though, which was curious. We talked about how the de-emphasis on the uniforms/clothing preserved personal identity. She said she found that people in the concentration camps and wanted to sit for portraits just to leave something behind that indicated their existence. Portrait work is 25% of all the artwork made during this period, which is an astounding percentage. It's the largest single category. The presenter quoted a museum in Israel where come of the portraits are housed: Portraits are "imbued with intense individuality and a dignity utterly denied to the sitters in real life." A Holocaust survivor who had a portrait done is quoted as saying "We want to be among the living at least on paper." Halina Olmucki
Another thing Elizabeth shared that I did not know is that Edith Kramer, before coming to the United States, worked with a woman (I did not get her name) who worked with children making art in the Terezin ghetto. Coming from an immigrant family myself and just thinking a lot about that with the current political climate I love that one of the founders of our field was an immigrant and that she had roots in art making as care and resistance and preservation of humanity.
The next part of the workshop we made art. It was essentially response art but she also gave a directive. I don't remember what it was because I didn't really need it. I was ready to just jump right in. Here's some photos of my art process.
Lunch was a sack lunch type of thing, Sandwich, brownie, potato salad, sprite. Some people were whining about it but I thought it was nice not to have to leave for lunch and I'm used to AATA where lunch isn't provided and the closest lunch is $12.
Art Therapy Through a Trauma Informed Lens for Addiction Treatment | J. Albright | Workshop
This presenter, Jennifer I think is her first name, was also a Mount Mary doctoral candidate and she was also really great. I've only known one person to go through Mount Mary's doctoral program but this conference made me see a lot more of what is coming out of that program which was really cool. Between this session and the previous one there's some pretty amazing work happening that will benefit us a lot as a field.
This session started with Jennifer going through some light neurobiology and art therapy and also talking about 12 step groups and addiction treatment. Of course everyone in the room is at least slightly interested in art therapy if not an art therapist already so she didn't really have to pitch to us but one of the things that she said that I just thought was very succinct and useful was "art therapy helps with processing top down and bottom up and can be inserted wherever." Wherever people are functioning in their brain it can meet them there. Of course we all know this but her way of explaining it was really great. Art making can help with people who are just working at a sensory and kinesthetic level but also reaches people who are in abstract thought and higher order thinking really well. I knew I was going to like this presenter when she started talking about Bruce Perry, Bessel van der Kolk, and Katherine Skaife.
Anyways, back on track, Jennifer spoke about how interconnected trauma work and addiction work are and how some complex questions come up when working with clients who need both. Examples of these questions where What if treating trauma causes relapse? What if not treating trauma causes relapse? and stuff like that. She also talked about steps 4 and 5 in the Big Book which are as follows: Step 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and Step 5. Admitted to god, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. Jennifer said these steps are really reminiscent of trauma work. She also talked about how relapse was related to going through these step(s) without proper support after causes relapse and not going through them at all also causes relapse. It was really interesting.
So in this one we used watercolors and first did a piece about our best day high or using. People who didn't have that experience were just supposed to imagine it or think of a client. I don't personally have the experience so I just tried to go off of what I've heard from others who have.
I just thought of this mental space where everything is right in the world, everything is beautiful, you're kind of floating with not a care in the world. You're like removed from all problems and issues and just able to appreciate the present moment that doesn't have any concerns in it. It's like a break from every day life.
We talked about these and the next part was paint (same materials) your worst day sober. This one was a little bit easier for me to be connected to. Since addiction isn't part of my story as a personal experience I took this as "paint your worst day in recovery or your worst day with your mental illness or symptoms."
For this one I just through of being on the floor. That was the first thing that came to mind, just being down. And everything being more real. Like the floor is real, table is real, the chair is real, the shining light is real. Like viscerally, tangibly, painfully real. And there's a glimpse of your best day in view (through the window) but you aren't super close to it. Even though this was a more difficult place and certainly a more unpleasant one, I still preferred this place to the first drawing. My thought this is uncomfortable and painful but it's certain, and I still prefer than the chaos of the first drawing.
We talked about these as well and looked at them together. We also talked about how to use this specific idea with clients and what the outcomes might indicate and stuff like that. I feel like I'm cheating you guys a little in not writing about all that here but I'm losing steam and still have one more section to add! If you are interested just email me or leave me a comment and I'll send you the rest of my notes from this talk. I left this session really excited and slightly more confident in both trauma and addictions work so that's awesome. It was a good feeling.
The last presentation that I attended was the one where I was presenting. Probably most of you reading this know the presentation because you've seen it but in case you haven't I was presenting a spoken-word dialogue that I wrote while I was in the process of working on my literature review or my research project (thesis equivalent). I interspersed snippets of my own story in narrative form with pieces of research that describe the experience of a wounded healer.
Immediately before the presentation I was freaking out. I think I was pretty collected on the exterior but in my head I was kind of losing it. I got really uneasy when I saw the room where I was presenting, it was essentially a chapel. It was beautiful. I wish I had asked someone to take a picture but that was not important at the time. So I asked for a volunteer, one volunteered and off we went. It went really well. I had it memorized but found myself looking at my paper just for comfort. I memorize it so that I can make eye contact with people as I'm talking but I've found that that gets intense and I need something a little more neutral to rest my eyes on in between meeting gazes.
I definitely am glad my support people were there. I had K, who I drove up with. S, a friend who graduated last year and now lives in Madison and came to the conference. And C, one of my art therapy heroines who I traveled to Africa with. I haven't talked to them about including them in my blog so I'm concealing their identities. Sort of, most of my readers are people who know all of them but still. I looked at them several times and just felt better with them there. It went really well. People had a lot of questions and I just tried to be really genuine and transparent and honest. I talked a bit about my research since there is some overlap but mostly people asked me questions or commented on parts of my story. It was pretty lovely.
After that, S, K, and I decided we were sort of conferenced out for the day so we went to get some dinner. There was one more hour-long session we could have attended but we were all pretty spent at that point. After dinner K and I went back to our Airbnb and pretty much immediately fell asleep. I woke up around 10:30 and did some homework and stuff and then went back to bed around 2. We woke up this morning and our host made us an awesome breakfast and then we hit the road. It was nice to drive during the day this time. The sun was pretty intense and we were quite warm but I am not complaining.
All in all it was an awesome experience. Congrats to Mount Mary for putting together a great conference. It was well organized and I loved all the sessions I attended. Also, thank you to them for letting me present. It was a great experience all around. While eating dinner S, K, and I all mentioned what a great conference it was and that we felt like we learned a lot for a one day thing.
I feel really grateful for my people and this community. I am so motivated to do everything I need to to finish school because I'm just really excited to keep on this path and be an art therapist.
Thanks for reading everyone!
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