Applied Arts and Health: Building Bridges across Arts, Therapy, Health, Education, and Community

By Ross W. Prior

This collection documents diverse approaches in creative arts engagement, building metaphoric bridges across the field with an emphasis on creativity and well-being in education and community development.

Focussing on applied arts and health practice, research, scholarship, expressive arts therapy, community and education, the book advances integrative and multimodal art-based processes. This book aims to give prominence to art-based research and provides useful support to those working and researching across applied arts and health, education and community contexts. The book brings together a collection of world-leading authors in the field spanning a range of cultures, documenting projects and significantly adding to cohesive research in the field.

In continuing to advance applied arts and health, whilst furthering a commitment to art-based research, this new book places emphasis upon the artistic research methodology, underlining that art (performing art and visual art) is the evidence. It offers the field an integral vision for the arts both theoretically and practically. Further, the book breaks down the silos of practice that have been unhelpful in their development.

The audience for this book will include art-based researchers, expressive arts practitioners and scholars, arts educators, and those interested in bridging the gap between arts and health practice. Masters and doctoral level students in art-based research, participatory research, and qualitative research with an arts-focus are another audience for the book. All applied arts and health practitioners and academics, arts educators, art therapists and university PaR programmes. Whilst of particular use to postgraduate students, this text will also be useful to final year undergraduate students in assisting them with creative practice-based dissertations and projects. Also useful to researchers, practitioners and a range of research degree programmes in applied arts and health, education and community engagement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jul 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789386271

Book preview

PART 1

ARTISTIC EVIDENCE

1

Art Is the Evidence: Convincing Public Communication of Art-Based Research and Its Outcomes

Shaun McNiff

Soul sympathizing with soul – ‘Building Bridges’

The four-word sentence – ‘Art is the evidence.’ – was the essential and perhaps complete message that I hoped to convey at the ‘Building Bridges’ in Applied Arts and Health, Education and Community Conference 2019 in Shropshire. I did address the nature of art-based research and its methods, but the focus of the session was on presenting outcomes directly through art.

My position on art evidence was summarized in the conference programme – Can we respect and perfect the ability of art to speak for itself, inspire, and convince rather than insist that art healing prove its worth through social science and translation into something other than itself? Art complements science in relationships where the partners maintain their integrity rather than reduce one to the other. The case for art and well-being may arguably be made in a more compelling way through evidence accessible to the public intelligence and its innate sensibility to artistic expression; not through increasingly standardized academic formats. Quality influences impact, so work needs to be done to effectively show how art enhances and transforms lives and communities everywhere.

In Shropshire, I described my personal experience with how art evidence can affect people and decision makers, how everything I do with the arts and health, and have done, can be traced back to a public presentation of art as evidence in 1972. I approached the Addison Gallery of American Art about showing the art made by patients in the art therapy programme I coordinated at Danvers State Hospital. The body of work, including art by Christopher and Priscilla (Figures 1.1 and 1.2), convinced the museum to present a major exhibition entitled Art Therapy at Danvers. The exhibition catalogue and selections of the art made in the Danvers programme can now be seen at a website documenting the history of the institution (McNiff n.d.).

Painted portrait of a man

FIGURE 1.1: Priscilla, Portrait of Christopher, early 1970s. Courtesy of S. McNiff.

Painted picture of a forest picnic

FIGURE 1.2: Priscilla, Forest Picnic, early 1970s. Courtesy of S. McNiff.

The show was celebrated by Boston and New England art critics and it was awarded a grant by the Massachusetts Council for the Arts and Humanities to travel to museums and university galleries throughout the Northeastern United States. The art evidence, presented within a serious art context, spoke to this broad audience; they experienced empirical proof of what artistic expression can do for individuals and communities.

I can also say as the person involved in generating the work in the art therapy studio and someone who has made a lifelong commitment to arts and health, that it also convinced me. The humble and straightforward evidence, then and now, offers compelling proof of how art can further well-being. Verbal reflections, testimony, satisfaction surveys, interviews, case descriptions, and various other forms of documenting therapeutic outcomes have their place in understanding how art heals, but they are secondary processes of translation, indirect evidence, that cannot replace the primacy of what artistic expressions convey about themselves, the process of making them, and the impact they have on those who perceive them. This is the direct and lasting evidence.

In the Shropshire presentation, I described how the Dean of the Graduate School at Lesley College, now University, saw the show when it was visiting Harvard University in 1973. He was moved and invited me to start the graduate programme that has since furthered the international growth and development of the arts in therapy, health, and education. The art evidence spoke forcefully to him. It was