Published: June 12, 2006
by: Martha Pitts
A high school sophomore in New Orleans takes a picture of the green mold covering the walls of her house and writes in her journal about the much-anticipated day she and her family can return home permanently.
A young boy from Pascagoula, Mississippi sits in an art center in Fairhope, Alabama during a "hurricane healing" workshop. He draws a picture of a face, colors it blue, and draws waves under the eyes.
And another young boy, one of many displaced children living in a trailer park in Baker, La. with their families, makes an ant out of pipe cleaners and tells a therapist the ant is scared of drowning.
In the nine months since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, many children have used art and other creative activities to express themselves and to cope with the traumatic events associated with the hurricane. The concept of art therapy rests on the idea that creative activities offer ways for children and young people to revisit a traumatic experience in ways that are healing. And in the aftermath of Katrina, there's a whole cohort of kids who need ways to process terrible loss on a large scale.
Why Art Therapy?
"Because of its interdisciplinary qualities—art, psychology, child development, arts education—art therapy is uniquely positioned to assist children with trauma," said Paige Asawa, therapist and co-author of the book A History of Art Therapy in the United States.
Asawa and several of her colleagues from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles have taken numerous trips to the Renaissance Village, a FEMA trailer park in Baker, La., to work with children displaced by Katrina.
And while Asawa has worked with both children and adults who've experienced different kinds of trauma—death in the family and witnessing violence, for example—she says the experience of Katrina was different.
"You can't compare them," Asawa said. "You're talking about the displacement of hundreds of thousands of kids, and the trauma went for days, in some cases for weeks and months. Families were relocated and torn apart."
Because the complexity of the disaster was incomprehensible to many of the children, art therapy has been especially beneficial, allowing the kids to express the inexpressible and to unlock hidden feelings.
Simply by re-telling a story, Asawa said, a child can be re-traumatized as he or she vividly remembers troubling events. However, if they have something else to do in the context of remembering—drawing, playing with clay, for example—they are less likely to become traumatized again.
Initially, Asawa and the other therapists provided art supplies to get the participants—ages 4 to 21—engaged in a creative activity. When they were ready to tell their stories, Asawa helped them do that through art.
"We sit with them, hear what they say, and take what they're saying to a therapeutic level," Asawa says. She explains that by asking questions about a piece, or encouraging the children to use a different art medium, the therapists help the children understand the emotions the artwork is expressing.
In Chicago, Art Therapy Connection uses the principles of art therapy to help public school students who are struggling with emotional issues. The program was profiled on Connect for Kids [2].
What They Drew
In many of the drawings Asawa saw, a house was the central figure on the page. But in the typical square-triangle configuration that makes up the house, the square was missing.
"That's all that was left when the water took over," Asawa said, explaining how some of the kids witnessed the water engulfing their homes, leaving only the roofs peeking out.
A constricted use of color and space can be a marker—a visual clue—to trauma. Nancy Raia, project director at the Eastern Shore Art Center in Alabama, chose to use the color blue as a symbolic theme guiding her "Hurricane Healing" workshops.
"Picasso had a blue period and I could only think in blue," Raia said. She called her project Faces of Katrina. Before they drew, the students—many of whom were displaced elementary school students from Louisiana and Mississippi—sat in a circle with Raia and shared their experiences with the hurricane and how they were affected.
Personal experience had convinced Raia of the healing power of arts therapy: When she lived in California, Raia and her children experienced the 1994 Northridge earthquake. They attended art therapy afterwards, and Raia found it was effective in helping her deal with her emotions after the quake. That experience pushed Raia to do something similar when she and her family moved to Alabama.
"The visual connects to their emotional at such a quick rate that they can't lie about it," Raia said of her work with displaced children and teens. Afterwards, the students told Raia they felt a release of emotion.
"You could see it in their faces," Raia said. "They'd tell me 'I had to get it out' or 'I didn't know I felt that way until I drew the picture.'"
Raia found that some of the older students she worked with had a political response to what had happened to their homes and neighborhoods. She said when she brought in a little wooden birdhouse, the older students ripped it apart, drew watermarks on the sides of the house. One wrote "Good job, Brownie" on the birdhouse—referring to then-FEMA chief Michael Brown.
The projects and workshops organized by the Eastern Shore Art Center culminated in an art exhibit where the local community and professional artists came to see the work. Some wrote that the youth's art really affected them. A man from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi told the audience that one of the blue faces expressed how he felt and he burst into tears.
Creating Beauty from Ugliness
Judi Holifield is director of the Whole Schools Initiative, which helps schools in the state incorporate the arts into their curriculum year round. She had worked before with Dream Yard and welcomed the group's offer to come down and put together a collaborative program.
"They were taking something that had been destroyed and making it memorable and beautiful, and healing from it," Holifield said.
As they worked in groups, students who didn't know each other beforehand talked about their experiences with Hurricane Katrina while building their kites. And on a cool and windy day in November, the students rode busses to the Bay St. Louis beach to fly their kites, each adorned with student-written poetry.
And did what did Holifield see on the beach?
"Joy, which was a missing ingredient," Holified said.
Sympathy from Other Kids
Like many people Belle Liang, a professor who teaches adolescent psychology at Boston College, was inundated with television images of children and their parents wandering the streets of New Orleans with a sense of hopelessness. Liang began thinking of ways to reach out to displaced youth.
"They were losing their social connections overnight," Liang said.
She went online and found a few blogs where displaced youth were trying to connect to each other, but with limited success. Liang said there weren't structured ways for these kids to connect. Then Liang and her students researched ways to help and came up with the idea of a Web siteGeneration Pulse [5]which was launched in February. The idea is that students displaced by the Gulf Coast hurricanes could participate by writing, art, and sharing experiences they would like the world to know, and others would be invited to respond.
One of the first participants was a 16-year-old girl who relocated to Virginia. Some of the students at her new high school told her to "get over it" when she talked about how much she missed her home in Louisiana. She was humiliated, and wrote about her feelings and experience in a journal and submitted to Generation Pulse.
Some kids from Brookline, Massachusetts read her journal online and decided to write letters to her expressing their sympathy.
"We want students to look outside of themselves toward the needs of others who are less privileged than they are and can learn a lot from," she said. "We want them to have this social network for certain social justice causes to use their power for kids."
Resources:
- The American Art Therapy Association has information about art therapy [6].
http://www.connectforkids.org/node/4273
Links:
[1] http://www.nasponline.org
[2] http://www.connectforkids.org//node/3729
[3] http://www.mswholeschools.org
[4] http://www.katrinaproject.homestead.com/
[5] http://www.bc.edu/genpulse
[6] http://www.arttherapy.org