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Looking at the world through older eyes
By
Jamie Stiehm,
Baltimore
Sun
October 21, 2003
An NIH program
with the
American
Visionary
Art Museum
pairs medical students and seniors
to explore aging with art.
The
American
Visionary
Art Museum
has space waiting on the walls for art created
by seemingly ordinary older people. As part of an experimental program on
art and aging, a dozen or so senior citizen recruits will have their work
hung near one of Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses' landscape
masterpieces, The Old Covered Bridge, which she painted when she was 83.
The museum on
Key Highway
was selected by the National Institutes of
Health as the site for a program on art and aging, which pairs senior city
residents with medical students. The program, "Vital Visionaries
Collaboration," will cost $45,000, institute officials said.
Each medical student volunteer will be teamed with an elderly person in a
series of meetings at the museum. The current exhibition, Golden Blessings
of Old Age, which features work by acclaimed artists who peaked late in
life, will be the program's focal point.
The doctor launching the project, Judith A. Salerno, said recruiting
healthy seniors may help the medical students form more positive images of
aging. Whether that proves true will be measured at the end by examining
the students' attitudes.
"We try to counter the stereotype that [seniors] tend to be frail or
demented,"
Salerno
said. "If we let the students see ways of
successful aging, that gives them a view that can carry them through their
entire medical careers."
Salerno
, deputy director of the National Institute on
Aging, said the medical students will be in their first or second year, in
order to influence them at a formative stage.
The project seeks medical students from
Johns
Hopkins
Hospital
, the University of Maryland Medical School and
others living in
Baltimore
.
'Different perception'
The geriatrician said students in their 20s are not likely to have much
firsthand experience with the elderly.
"It's how dispersed we are. We don't grow up seeing our grandparents,
so we have here an opportunity to see seniors in a positive light and move
medical students toward a different perception,"
Salerno
said.
Four evening meetings are planned over nine months, with the first session
taking place at the museum this year, she said. The sessions are planned
as a kind of journey back and forth through time.
The two-person teams will be asked to explore the exhibit together at
first. Later in the program, the teams will be asked to create a piece of
art together. They may be asked to imagine -- or draw -- themselves old if
they are young and young if they are old. In the last meeting, their joint
artwork will be shown in an exhibit in the museum's "Community
Voices" gallery.
The founder of the museum, Rebecca A. Hoffberger, believes the pilot
project may encourage creativity in the older participants and enhance
their self-respect.
As she walked through the galleries of the Blessings exhibit, which
includes work by artists in their 90s, Hoffberger said, "It's very
important to see that the best part of life can be at the very end."
Hoffberger, 51, said her once-rebellious baby boomer generation is fast
becoming a "silver tsunami" and needs to learn more lessons
about aging well.
Experts in geriatrics and art say there is evidence to suggest people in
their 80s and 90s can be more creative. At that stage, they say, social
conventions are less important and inhibiting to people.
"Sometimes people become emboldened," Marcia Semmes, the
museum's director of development, said. "They reach a point where
they don't care what people think."
'Aliveness'
If they feel a certain liberty, the project's seniors might be more
inspired to express their life experiences than ever before, Semmes added.
The Blessings exhibit features self-portraits and other autobiographical
art. But it's not all as tranquil as the rural
America
of "Grandma" Moses. In a series of
needlework embroideries and appliques, the late artist Esther Nisenthal
Krinitz narrated her Jewish girlhood in a Polish village overtaken by Nazi
soldiers in 1939.
"These are all on fire with aliveness," Hoffberger said of the
sculptures, mixed media and paintings in the Blessings exhibit. "The
lifelong thing they [artists] take with them is art."
For information on volunteering for the "Vital
Visionaries" program, call (202) 884-8611.
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© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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