Interviewsand Articles

 

Editor's introduction w&c #6 : Art and Healing

by R. Whittaker, Apr 25, 2002


 

 





There are a number of features in this issue that touch on the relationship between art and healing. We have a fascinating interview with Katherine Sherwood, painter and art professor at UC Berkeley. In May of 1997 Sherwood suffered a devastating cerebral hemorrhage that threatened her career both as an artist and a teacher. But seven months after her stroke, Sherwood returned to her studio to take up painting again.
     Unable to use her right hand, she struggled with her left hand. Her return to painting, compromised as it was, turned out to be the best path to recovery and she was able to resume her career both as a painter and teacher. In fact, many people remarked that her painting had become better than ever before. Sherwood talks about her remarkable journey and her visions for the future.
     In our second interview we meet James Hubbell, artist and architect, well known and much loved in the San Diego area. So much of what Hubbell shares concerns the search for wholeness, which is the root meaning of healing. Hubbell is one of those individuals difficult to categorize. He’s an artist and architect, but also a master of many crafts and a visionary diplomat to boot. He creates international projects that bring people together from many countries to design and build new parks from scratch. The word “visionary” is sometimes used to place an individual outside the circle the rest of us live in. But Hubbell has learned how to live more in the world we live in, not less; he would call it “trusting yourself”— letting more of the deep capacities, built into us as humans, function. Because of his dyslexia, Hubbell suffered a rough passage through our educational system. But like so many other gifted people with this problem, his creativity and flexibility flourished.
     And sticking with good things unconventional, we have an excerpt from, The Cur(s)e of the Mummy by New York artist J. Kathleen White, whose work we have featured before. A conscious mummy goes to Montana. Laughter is the best medicine producing an effervescence of little healing particles.
     This brings me to the article on Leta Ramos and Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, a place entirely dedicated to artmaking’s therapeutic effects. The CGAC was founded in 1973 as the first independent art center for severely disabled adults in the U.S.. Ramos has had a long relationship with the Center as a volunteer and ardent supporter. The relationship of art and healing is foundational at the CGAC, but it’s the insider/outsider art dichotomy invoked at the Center that stopped me for some reflection. What does “outsider art” mean? In Ramos, who moves effortlessly between the worlds of “insider art” and “outsider art,” the distinction just seems to evaporate.
     There’s more. We have an evocative account of artist Katina Huston’s visit to Japan. She traveled at the invitation of two of her former art students and was given an exhibit of her work there. Her efforts to engage in conversation with Japanese artists takes us into the ambiguous space between cultures. And our section “from readers,” which began last issue, continues with work from Los Angeles artist Margaret von Biesen. Welcome to issue #6.—rw        
 

About the Author

Richard Whittaker is the founding editor of works & conversations and West Coast editor of Parabola magazine.      

 

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