Across the city senior citizens are getting in touch with their creative sides, and students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago are helping them do it.
A group of nursing-home residents wrote stories from their lives in booklets they made and decorated. Some older Latvian immigrants videotaped their stories. Several senior-center drop-ins staged an exhibition of their work.
“Art can be important to people of any age, but for seniors a lot of the value can come around things like life review, the potential for socializing and the joy of being productive,” said Randy Vick, chairman of the art education and art therapy department.
“If you have some limitation to your abilities due to health reasons, there is a sense of loss. Art is a wonderful way to re-engage because you see a product–and that can be very gratifying.”
Aims of the award
The students who guide these efforts are winners of the annual Hilgos Award, a grant program designed to encourage creative expression by elderly people. It was established by Chicago-area resident Berna Huebner in memory of her late mother, Hilda Goldblatt Gorenstein.
Gorenstein graduated from the Art Institute in the 1920s and became a respected maritime painter under the name “Hilgos.” Late in her life, after dementia set in and she was living in a nursing home, several Art Institute students helped her resume the art she had given up.
The fund provides up to four annual awards of $1,000 to any of the school’s graduate or undergraduate degree-seeking students who have completed projects or wish to launch them. Three awards were given in 2000, the grant’s first year, and four were given this year. Judges are representatives from the school and the health-care field.
The students must design their projects and identify the seniors with whom they will be working. They also must devote at least 100 hours each to their projects. Depending upon the project, many of the students solicit donations for their supplies or purchase their own.
“Is this a project about making great art? In most cases, no,” Vick said. “It’s about making connections and changing, to some degree, people’s senses of self or their place in the world.
“It’s really been a delightful project. I want to see it grow every year and find ways to keep it growing in people’s awareness.”
Books and more books
For more than a year, two-time award winner Laura Evonne Steinman, who recently completed her master’s degree in art education, has been working with several seniors at the Copernicus Senior Center, 3160 N. Milwaukee Ave., a drop-in center sponsored by the Chicago Department on Aging.
During their weekly sessions, the seniors make books of many varieties from paper, fabric, wood and other materials.
“I show them how to make a bunch of different books,” Steinman said. “Some make a book a day. Some are traditional, like little pamphlets. We’ve done accordion books, where the pages fold out, and books with fabric covers with sewn pages.”
The book contents also vary, Steinman said.
“Some people put poems in books, some drawings,” she said. “Some made them for other people. One day we made Valentine’s Day books with valentines inside.”
Yet another book included photographs of the participants in every decade of their lives.
The project is much more than an art class, Steinman said.
“It isn’t about coming in and leaving,” she said. “It’s more about us coming together and the books being the springboard for dialogue between all of us. We share stories while we’re making these books. These people know so much and have done so much.
“At the same time, we’re taking their creative license and doing some really [difficult] books. If you go into so many elder centers or nursing homes, people give elders a super-easy craft project like their brains aren’t there.”
Creating autobiographies
Serena Worthington also led a bookmaking group but placed a greater emphasis on their autobiographies.
Her group consisted of several residents at the Lieberman Geriatric Health Centre, a long-term-care facility in Skokie. For eight weeks this spring they met weekly, sometimes in groups and sometimes individually.
During the initial sessions they made and decorated a simple booklet, bound by thread running through punched holes. They decorated the fronts with ribbon and markers. Later, the pages were filled with biographical narratives that sprang from the group’s discussions.
“This generation of people is passing away,” said Worthington, who is working on her master’s degree in art therapy. “I think it is very important to pay attention and listen to and note the people who are this age now because they survived so much.”
The group talked about where they were born, life in wartime Europe, food, weddings, spouses, their hardships and more. Some of the participants wanted to write their stories in their own books and others did not.
Worthington helped with the writing, both by hand or by taping narratives and transcribing and typing them.
“From what I can tell, they liked having these books as objects, something nice to remember the experience,” Worthington said.
“I think having social time with peers was really beneficial.
“Having someone be interested in a story that to them seems not-so-interesting was kind of validating to them.”
“Book-making has come up a couple of times” among the entries, Vick said. “It’s kind of by happenstance, but for elderly [people] who don’t have a lot of art background and who are intimidated by it, it’s an approachable subject.
“It also involves a lot of things that are useful, such as life reviews and memory things.”
Alexis London, who is working on her master’s degree in art education, is helping seniors preserve their histories through a variety of artistic means. Because her project is still in its early stages, she doesn’t yet know precisely what those artistic means will be.
In the meantime, she is leading discussions with her group members, residents at the Resurrection Retirement Community on the Northwest Side, about their earlier lives, family traditions and fond memories.
Then she will introduce various forms of creative expression and lead the participants into individual projects of their choosing.
“I’m interested in crossing a lot of different media,” London said.
“This project is not just about bookmaking or sculpture or writing, but how to integrate all kinds of media to create documents such as books, collages and sculptures that show a particular history or idea.
“We’re talking about ways they can share their histories and knowledge with family members and the general public.”
“When working with people, you might have one plan, but when you start working, things can change,” Vick said. “People have different needs and abilities, and we are open to the evolution of a project.”
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For more information on the Hilgos Award at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, call 312-899-7480.
