by Dylan Klempner

This article was first published in The DC Line here.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to drive demand for mental health services, a DC-based group of art therapists is participating in an online exhibit that highlights the potential for cultivating resilience through art making. 

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 35.9% of adults in the District reported symptoms of anxiety and/or depressive disorder in a survey conducted from Sept. 29 to Oct. 11, 2021. This figure is somewhat higher than the 31.6% of adults nationwide who reported these symptoms.

As the need for mental health support has grown, therapists themselves have also reported symptoms of burnout. Some concerned about increased demand on already-strained mental health professionals are labeling this “another pandemic mental health crisis” and are calling for changes in the nation’s mental health system, including added support for therapists.  

Amid these trends, art therapists in the greater Washington, DC, area are using an online art exhibit to build community and share personal examples of art’s therapeutic potential. 

Works by 25 art therapists are part of “Resilience Through Art in 2020 – 2021,” an online exhibit available on the website of the Potomac Art Therapy Association (PATA), a professional organization serving the Washington area. The group is a chapter of the national American Art Therapy Association (AATA) based in Alexandria, Virginia. 

An untitled work by Tyler Strusowski, president of the Potomac Art Therapy Association’s board, is part of the exhibit of works by 25 art therapists. (Photo courtesy of Tyler Strusowski)

Tyler Strusowski, president of PATA’s board, is one of the art therapists whose work is in the show. 

Prior to the pandemic, he had been working as an art therapist and artist-in-residence at the McClendon Center, which provides mental health services in DC and operates an art studio for its clients.

Tyler Strusowski

A month into the spring 2020 lockdowns, the DC-based art therapist remembers craving the art making he was missing. “When I was working at the McClendon Center, art was in my life, every day,” said Strusowski. “When we went into lockdown, it wasn’t.” 

Inspired by the tulips and poppies blooming in his Northeast DC neighborhood, Strusowski bought a large canvas and began collecting collage materials. 

While working on his piece at home, Strusowski learned that a client he had become close to had died. As he dealt with his feelings about her death, art making served a therapeutic role, he said. “I was mourning her through that process.” 

Art therapy defined

Research has confirmed the effectiveness of art therapy, a mental health profession that specifically integrates psychotherapy theories and practices with the intentional selection of art materials, according to Jordan Potash, associate professor in the Art Therapy Program at George Washington University. 

“With an art therapist, a substantial amount of time is going to be spent actually creating artwork,” said Potash.  

Making art during an art therapy session can help clients relax, a welcome contrast to how they might respond in a different context, said Tally Tripp, associate professor and founding director of the George Washington University Art Therapy Clinic in Alexandria, Virginia. 

“It doesn’t have quite the same stress involved in the purely verbal therapeutic relationship,” she said. 

Tripp said that some clients, especially those who have dealt with trauma, may have difficulty accessing words and emotions. Art making offers tools she can use as their therapist.

“We can work with clay or experiment with different kinds of media, and that’s going to promote a healing that is really strengths based,” Tripp said.

Tracy Councill, program director and co-founder of the DC-based nonprofit Tracy’s Kids, created prayer flags for the exhibit. (Photo courtesy of Tracy Councill)

Art therapy can help people cultivate resilience because it is an “active and engaged practice” that provides a sense of control, said Tracy Councill, program director and co-founder of the DC-based nonprofit Tracy’s Kids. 

“It puts you in a position of control. And that can be very meaningful to people in therapy,” she said. 

Like other mental health professionals, art therapists must undergo academic and clinical training before obtaining credentials to practice, said Potash. 

The Art Therapy Credentials Board, a group based in Greensboro, North Carolina, offers testing that leads to a national credential for art therapists. Practitioners may also need to pursue additional licensure in their home state. More than a dozen states, including Maryland and Delaware, have passed laws granting licensure specifically for art therapists, and DC recently followed suit.

“Licensure laws, in general, are there to protect the public,” said Potash, who serves as chair of PATA’s licensure committee. “Only somebody who has the unique education and qualifications of an art therapist will be able to call themselves an art therapist.” 

The Professional Art Therapist Licensure Amendment Act was signed into law in DC by Mayor Muriel Bowser in April 2020. The law, passed by the DC Council at PATA’s behest, lists qualifications and standards to practice as a professional art therapist in the District. 

Art therapy and resilience 

Councill said many art therapists use their personal art practices to process their own experiences. “In my work, there is a lot of sadness and loss, right, because I work with a lot of kids with serious illnesses.”

Tracy Councill

Though she rarely makes art directly about losing a patient or someone close to her, Councill has a “need to be creatively engaged. I need to have an arena in which I feel that sense of agency and that ability to respond and be resilient.”  

That’s the line of thinking that led Kelly Jacobs, PATA’s vice president of communications, to come up with the idea for the online art show. 

She said that as the shutdowns took hold, she tried to think of creative ways in which members could connect and share their artistic experiences without requiring a Zoom call. Together, she and her colleagues settled on the idea for the show’s title, which focuses on the idea of resilience. 

Jacobs said she heard from art therapists in the early days of the pandemic about the stress they were under, the challenges they faced, and the adaptations they made. 

“It was hard, but there was so much creativity that was happening. And that all seemed to just kind of relate to this idea of resilience,” said Jacobs. “Adapting, being creative, growing from the experience.”

For the artwork she submitted to the PATA art show, Tripp used a technique known as slow stitching, which emphasizes the use of needle and thread for art making rather than for their more practical purposes, such as mending. Tripp said the practice is good for stress reduction. “It was just a way to be focused and relaxed.”

Tally Tripp submitted her stitching project for the online exhibit. (Photo by Mark Morrow)

A half-century of art therapy in DC 

The history of art therapy locally goes back at least a half-century. In 1971, Bernard Levy and Elinor Ulman co-founded George Washington University’s Art Therapy Program, one of the nation’s first. 

The DC area has also been home to leading art therapy programs including Creative Forces: NEA Military Healing Arts Network, a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Department of Defense that began in 2004. 

Tracy’s Kids, a medical art therapy program for children dealing with cancer, had its start at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. The nonprofit now also supports seven other art therapy clinics at pediatric cancer hospitals, including Children’s National Hospital. 

Art therapy and the political sphere 

Art therapy has long enjoyed bipartisan backing from politicians and their families. 

Just a few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Hillary Rodham Clinton – then a newly elected New York senator – read a Congressional Record statement supporting art therapy as a mental health field. 

Marcelle Leahy, wife of Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, is a Tracy’s Kids board member, while Karen Pence, former Tracy’s Kids board member and former second lady, has played, perhaps, the most visible role in raising awareness about the field. 

Shortly after the inauguration of President Donald Trump in 2017, Pence announced that art therapy would be her signature cause. 

But many art therapists challenged the AATA’s willingness to embrace the second lady as an ally. In protest, more than 1,700 joined a Facebook group known as Art Therapists for Human Rights. 

“We demand that AATA respond to Karen Pence’s stated commitment to our field by asking her to publicly take action for the rights of … all people who are in danger as a result of the policies of the current administration,” reads a statement on the group’s page describing its mission during the Trump administration. 

Pence’s interest in art therapy prompted a lot of conversations among art therapists about government policies and other factors that impact their clients, Potash said. 

“Systemic racism takes a toll on clients and limits their ability to access services in ways that they can’t overcome on their own,” said Potash. In the years since Pence’s endorsement, he added, AATA has reviewed its policies and practices and looked “at how to make changes in the interest of equity and inclusion.” 

Art therapy and social justice

Potash uses art therapy to facilitate intergroup dialogue. Art therapists, he said, can play a meaningful role in supporting social justice and community development.

Art can help people visualize systemic injustices, said Potash. “But just showing them might not be enough.”

Art therapists, he explained, can help untrained audiences who may not have the skills to see meaning in a work of art — a role particularly valuable when it comes to getting a deeper understanding of artwork about injustices. 

“Art therapists can help to lead meaningful opportunities for viewers to really get a sense of what it is the artists are trying to convey,” he said. 

As a result of art therapists’ training in psychotherapy and group dynamics, they can also help people use art to communicate about their differences and come up with new policies and programs.

“Art therapists can also — using our skills in groups and whatnot — create art making opportunities where people come together to create art and to try to reimagine ways in which the world could be.” 

Participants at a workshop held as part of George Washington University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service were asked to create images of a personal experience that defined their social. cultural or political outlook. (Photo courtesy of Jordan Potash and Alberta Gyimah-Boadi)

Prior to the pandemic, Potash and a colleague, art therapist Alberta Gyimah-Boadi, led a series of intergroup dialogue workshops that incorporated art making at GW during its Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, as well as at public libraries in the District and in Virginia, they said. 

“We ask people to come and create art [based] on an experience from their life that has led them to their current political views,” said Potash. “The goal of this is to refocus people not so much on political debate, but that people’s perspectives come from somewhere.” 

Gyimah-Boadi said she and Potash were inspired by King’s teachings that encourage people to work together to fix a flawed system. The two of them asked participants to use art making to focus on one another’s stories rather than on their individual views.  

“People may see the issue differently,” said Gyimah-Boadi. “But at the bottom of it, there’s still an issue.” 

For PATA’s virtual show, several art therapists submitted artwork focused on social justice. 

Councill contributed three pieces titled “Prayer Flag Portraits” that depict the faces of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, whose deaths prompted massive Black Lives Matter protests around the world during the spring and summer of 2020. 

Councill, who attended some of the protests, said that the prayer flags are a form of personal expression. “They’re still hanging on the front of my house.” 

She also brought the art to work at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, the site of one of the Tracy’s Kids art therapy clinics. Many of the children being treated there are African American, she said. 

“I wanted to make it very, very clear to the kids and families that I work with, that I want to do everything I could to be present to them,” Councill said.

“The kids also made their own prayer flags about things that they were worried about during that time,” she said. Some made art about the protests, violence and the pandemic. 

For Strusowski, art making works therapeutically for him in multiple ways. “It becomes my way of processing things that happen and developing insights as to what my feelings actually are,” he said.

He described insights that arose during the spring of 2020 while he worked on his piece for the online exhibit. Through the art making process, Strusowski said he came to realize that despite being close to a client who died, his understanding of her life was limited. 

“I didn’t live their life. And I didn’t have the things that happened to her, happen to me,” Strusowski said. “And that’s kind of where I started to come to peace with the fact that I would never see her again.” 

By Roy Gao

This article was first published in The DC Line here. It was developed within Day Eight’s week-long, 2021 summer arts journalism institute.

With just the movement of a computer mouse, a silver pitcher covered with two winged camels and foliate patterns is viewable from all angles and at various scales. This Central Asian artifact, made in the late seventh or early eighth century A.D., is just one of numerous 3D items that visitors can access through a National Museum of Asian Art virtual exhibition. The museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, is far from alone in having launched virtual exhibits at a time when the pandemic kept museums and galleries from fully reopening.

Even as DC art institutions like the National Museum of African Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery have gradually reopened their doors to the public, not everyone is ready to head downtown, particularly with the rise in COVID-19 cases due to the spread of the delta variant. Luckily, the city’s museums have adapted over the past year to offer an equally valuable experience through online exhibitions. Antonietta Catanzariti, assistant curator for the ancient Near East at the National Museum of Asian Art, notes that visitation to their website has doubled in the past year, and remains high even as the museum and others have reopened.

That’s hardly surprising. “Virtual exhibitions are similar to physical exhibitions, often capitalizing on the web’s capacity for a personalized experience in which the user directs their own journey,” wrote Ngaire Blankenberg in her 2014 book Manual of Museum Exhibitions. (Blankenberg, formerly a cultural consultant, became director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in July.)

Here are examples of what you can find online from three DC museums: 

National Museum of Asian Art (formerly the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery)

The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads, curated by the National Museum of Asian Art, has been open since 2019. With no specified end date, this timeframe is rare for physical exhibitions, which are usually open for weeks or months. 

Kimon Keramidas, New York University professor of digital humanities and a curator of the show, said digital exhibitions can usually last for five to six years before advances in technology lead to complications. Even then, however, they can still be updated and recovered.

Digital exhibitions also allow for the display of artifacts that might not otherwise have been available. The curators of the Sogdians exhibition, for instance, decided to go digital due to challenging geopolitical circumstances, according to Keramidas: The trade embargoes that followed Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 prevented important collections from loaning objects.

The exhibition is packed with about 700 pieces of material, including 3D models, images, custom maps, drone footage and more. The exhibit’s subject matter is similarly rich in diversity. 

Julian Raby, director emeritus of the museum, calls the Sogdians an “underestimated” people. They were an ethnic group that lived in the first millennium A.D., occupying a vast terrain of Eurasia and significantly shaping Silk Roads culture and commerce. As merchants, craftsmen and entertainers, the Sogdians lived and traveled everywhere from China to the lands of the Byzantine Empire. 

In one section of the virtual exhibition, the visitor follows a historical trade route and sees a moving map, photographs of the terrain, and text describing each location. Unlike maps on gallery walls that could be easily overlooked, here the geographic tour takes center stage in the experience. 

“There is a sense of immediate rapport that could be quite powerful,” Raby said in an interview.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery

Hirshhorn Museum’s Lost in Place: Voyages in Video debuted in May 2021 as a direct response to the pandemic, which the exhibition text states had “greatly diminished our radius of movement — collapsing home, office, and school into a single location — and recalibrated our sense of personal boundaries.” Drawn from the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection, the digital exhibition brought together 11 videos by contemporary artists from around the world. They were each made available for viewing in sequential and overlapping four-week spans, with the last one accessible through Aug. 20.

One of the videos, Laure Prouvost’s Swallow, inundates the viewer’s eyes and ears with a sensual intimacy that is almost unsettling. While following a group of nude bathers in a stream, Prouvost’s camera fades in and out of extreme close-ups on body parts, flapping fish, and crushed berries. This all occurs while recurrent sounds of breathing and shots of an open mouth span the entirety of the video’s run. After a year of Zoom-room socializations, such sudden closeness with bodies and nature is especially striking.

Purchase Fund, 2008 (Photo courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden)

Among the other featured videos were Pierre Huyghe’s One Million Kingdoms, starring a digital avatar traversing a lunar landscape generated by her voice; the artist collective Superflex’s Flooded McDonald’s, a meditation on the fast-food restaurant chain’s material footprint that depicts a kitchen slowly filled with 20,000 gallons of water; Carlos Amorales’ Dark Mirror, featuring animations of wolves, bears, falling airplanes, and other images evocative of danger; and Guido van der Werve’s Nummer Negen (#9): The Day I Didn’t Turn with the World, a time lapse of the geographic North Pole, where the artist stood for 24 hours facing away from the sun.

National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA)

The NMWA’s online exhibitions, which are running indefinitely, mimic carefully crafted walking tours. They employ sequences of web pages that are as immersive as museum displays, which viewers navigate with their mouse and arrow keys.

The first online exhibition curated by the museum is the ongoing show A Global Icon: Mary in Context, which launched in 2015. The featured sculptures and paintings of the Virgin Mary come from Europe as well as Japan, Ethiopia, Mexico and more. With each page turn, the web window can zoom into a detail of the work or present an explanatory video that highlights the various contexts in which the biblical figure Mary appears.

The same kind of seamless passage from content to content characterizes NMWA’s newer exhibitions, like Ambreen Butt — Mark My Words, which launched last year and interlaces videos of her work process with displays of her paintings, prints and collages.

In June 2020, the museum redesigned its website to host its online exhibitions as part of an ongoing effort to enhance its digital platform. Laura Hoffman, the director of digital engagement, explained that the pandemic had prompted discussions in the field about what a museum experience without physical access ought to look like. 

With NMWA undergoing a major two-year renovation as of Aug. 9, Hoffman said the pandemic provided a useful — and timely — opportunity to explore the museum’s digital capabilities leading up to its temporary closure.

“The pandemic almost felt like a test run for all the digital possibilities there are,” Hoffman said.

Roy Gao was born in Boston, MA, but grew up in Pittsburgh, PA and in Beijing, China. Before college, he lived in and studied in both the United States and China. Roy received his bachelor’s degree in 2021, from the University of Pittsburgh, with a double major in Art History and Philosophy. For the fall, he has been admitted to the Master’s program in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2020, Roy was a top-ranked applicant for the Fine Foundation Fellowship at the Carnegie Museum of Art (before the fellowship was cancelled due to COVID-19). He was the curator of “Footsteps” at the China Millennium Monument in 2019, and co-curator of “This Is Not Ideal: Gender Myths and Their Transformation” held at the University Art Gallery of the University of Pittsburgh in 2018.