Crafting Stories of Seniors into Art 

By Bill Glauber, The Journal Sentinel online

May 10, 2009

Anne Basting (right) was instrumental in getting musician Paul Cebar (left) together with artist David Greenberger, who listened to the stories of residents of senior centers in Milwaukee.

The stories are stashed in the deepest recesses of the human mind, tales of childhood and work, glimpses of growing older.

For 30 years, the artist David Greenberger has sat for hours in nursing homes and senior centers across America, pulled together fragments of conversations from older adults and turned them into art, creating a world that comes alive in home-made magazines, books, paintings, sculptures and spoken-word and musical works.

He has crafted dispatches from senior citizens who have memory loss.
"It's to illuminate ourselves," Greenberger says. "When people say, 'nobody " wants to be old,' what they're saying is 'they don't want to die.'

Greenberger's art will be heard Wednesday at the Pabst Theater in a concert that culminates a months-long project in Milwaukee.

It's called "Cherry Picking Apple Blossom Time."

Greenberger, who lives in upstate New York, made three separate trips to Milwaukee in 2008 to meet with 60 seniors and absorb their stories. It was the centerpiece of an arts project launched by the Center on Age and Community at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

With local musician Paul Cebar, he set words to music, to illustrate character, to provide a window into the world of aging, including memory loss and Alzheimer's disease.

What Greenberger and Cebar have created is stunning: 38 vignettes, rooted in Milwaukee.

There are stories of toboggan rides in Currie Park and nuns who yell; dogs and children; small apartments and discovering a new city; and fleeting images of long-lost parents, the kind who died too young and you never got to know.

"Look at me. I have a red shirt. I live in Milwaukee," opens the vignette, "A King in Milwaukee, part 1, a jumble of thoughts, trinkets from a life."
Why turn these memories into art? Because they can help us all deal with the mystery and terror of memory loss, help us confront our inevitable aging, show organizers say.

"We get stuck at fear and don't want to go beyond that," says Anne Basting, director of the Center on Aging. "You need this on a symbolic level to comprehend it, look at it in a new way."

Greenberger is blunter.

"We're machines made out of meat," he says. "We break."
Greenberger has been doing this sort of work since 1979, when, fresh out of school with a degree in fine arts, he became an activities director at a nursing home in Boston.

"On the day that I first met the residents of the nursing home, I abandoned painting," he explains on his Web site. "That is to say, I discarded the brushes and canvas, not the underlying desire to see something in the world around me and then communicate it to others."

He created what has come to be known as The Duplex Planet, "an ongoing work designed to portray a wide variety of real characters who are old or in decline."
From conversations, he has created art across a range of media.
He says his art "doesn't fit into any categories."
But, art it surely is, delicate and human.

The current project brought Greenberger together with Cebar, a local bandleader known for his roots-inflected music that draws on jazz, blues and a New Orleans style.

The sound of a guitar, a mandolin or a saxophone adds to the mood of the work, provides the underpinning to the stories, focuses the character.

"There is a real regard for language," Cebar says. "They are more experienced than we are. They have gathered in more of the world than we have, even if they left something behind."

The work does not deny aging. Instead, aging is confronted, head on, music and memories mixing to create something timeless.

During Wednesday's performance at the Pabst Theater, some of those who participated in conversations with Greenberger will be in attendance, along with their families.

They have yet to hear the work, which will be performed live for the first time. There is also a CD of the project.

Organizers of the event are hopeful that the audience will be entertained as well as educated, that laughter will mix with a few tears.

They hope, too, that the work touches those who have relatives with memory loss.

"Go listen one more time," Basting says. "Think about the meaning of being and humanity."

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