Brooking Paper First Prize 2005: Marcia Semmes

2005 Brooking Paper—First Prize: Marcia Semmes

“Vital Visionaries: The Museum Cure”
By Marcia Semmes
Former Director of Public Relations and Development
American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore

From the judges: “We always ask if museums matter and this one does. It is creative, innovative, and true to its mission. The big question this paper asks is ‘can museum education change lives?’ The answer is a resounding YES!”

The first time she visited Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM), Maggie Kramer, 68, was in a wheelchair and accompanied by a nurse’s aide and an oxygen tank. Four months later, Maggie returned—this time walking without assistance and proudly showing her family around the museum she had come to feel was her own.

The key to Maggie’s rejuvenation was AVAM’s Vital Visionaries program, a collaboration between the museum and the National Institute on Aging (NIA) that exploded rigid stereotypes of old age. The four-session program was a highlight of the museum’s 10th megaexhibition, “Golden Blessings of Old Age,” which presented the work of self-taught artists in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. (During its annual megaexhibitions, the museum dedicates five of its seven galleries to exploring a philosophical theme that inspires human beings to be creative.)

Vital Visionaries paired 15 first-year medical students from John Hopkins University with community members age 65 and older. Together they toured the museum and exhibition, met with one of the “Golden Blessings” artists, and took lessons in blind contour drawing (in which the artist looks solely at his subject rather than at the paper). In the process, the medical students and senior citizens learned about themselves, each other, and the value of creative, self-reliant expression.

“Though a simple concept,” said one younger participant, “the fact is that many medical students are ignorant about the thriving older populations in this community and simply giving us this experience really opened our eyes.”

A senior participant relished the fact that her student-partner “did not regard me as a ‘grandma,’ but rather as a vital, creative person, and that is the self-image that I will continue to affirm.”

Conceived and funded by NIA, the program was based on two studies whose preliminary results showed that 1) creative interaction with senior citizens can make medical students better caregivers in their careers as doctors and 2) older adults who internalize negative stereotypes of old age may live shorter lives. Vital Visionaries had two key goals: to foster medical students’ improved understanding and appreciation of older people and remind senior participants about their own creative possibilities.

The results were nothing short of astounding. The medical students who participated were significantly more likely to want to include large numbers of older patients in their future practices—almost 75 percent of student participants, compared to 13 percent of the students who did not take part. In addition, the number of students who planned to obtain specialized training in geriatrics doubled, from 10 percent before the program to 20 percent afterward.

“It is very important to expose young medical students to healthy older people,” noted one student participant. “I think programs like this could increase hope for geriatrics and make it a more appealing specialty.” Among the senior participants, Minnie Kaufman’s enthusiastic reaction was typical. “This program has validated my feelings that I am not a square peg in a round hole,” she wrote to the museum. “It has given me inspiration, exhilaration, and a feeling of belonging to a group of very special people who have been blessed with talent that they are proud to exhibit. One more tidbit: I AM WAITING TO BE DISCOVERED. Thank you, again.”

The Need

AVAM’s exhibition text is always an amalgam of poetry, song lyrics, artists’ words, recipes, prescriptions, and solid scientific fact, and “Golden Blessings” was no different. As staff conducted research for the exhibition, they discovered that a “silver tsunami” is sweeping across America; in fact, a baby boomer turns 50 every seven seconds.

According to Geriatric Medicine: A Clinical Imperative for an Aging Population, an April 2004 report by the Association of Directors of Geriatric Academic Programs and the American Geriatrics Society, the need for geriatricians to treat those aging baby boomers is fast approaching crisis proportions. Currently there are only 7,500 certified geriatricians in the United States, not enough to meet 14,000 specialists required to care for today’s elderly population and far fewer than the 36,000 who will be needed by 2030.

In addition, the landmark 1998 MacArthur Foundation Study on Aging in America had concluded that lifestyle and attitude are significantly more important than genetics in determining whether one’s later years are healthy ones, even if one has a predisposition for Alzheimer’s, arthritis, or cancer. A 2002 study conducted at Yale University’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health confirmed those findings, concluding that older people with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive self-perceptions, an effect greater than that of exercising or not smoking.

As they worked on “Golden Blessings,” AVAM’s staff began to think about how to impart this information to museum audiences. With NIA’s input and support, those conversations led to what would become Vital Visionaries.

In October 2003, 30 senior citizens, responding to a Baltimore Sun article about the planned program, volunteered to take part; each volunteer received a $100 stipend. To ensure diversity, the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging provided potential contacts from minority communities.

Dr. Jean Ogborn, who teaches a first-year class called Physicians in the Community at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, gave her students credit for taking part. Two groups of students—a control group and the participants—took a test called the Aging Semantic Differential to measure their attitudes toward older people, and the Vital Visionaries stage was set.

The Sessions

The first Vital Visionaries session took place on a cool Tuesday afternoon in March 2004. Senior participants arrived early and scattered themselves at tables that had been placed around AVAM’s permanent collection. he medical students, running late, blew in like a fresh wind. Each took a seat opposite one of the seniors in pairings that were later revealed to have uncanny commonalities. One student/senior pair both lived in the same apartment building, two floors apart, though they had never met. Two others played trombone and another pair were avid hikers, a sport they took up together. A student of Irish descent paired up with a woman who had owned an Irish pub (they later celebrated St. Patrick’s Day together); a former Catholic schoolgirl headed over to a nun.

Plunging participants right into the action, journalist Don Lambert began the program by giving a lesson in blind contour drawing. Lambert had discovered and championed artist Elizabeth Layton, whose work was a centerpiece of the “Golden Blessings” show. Layton’s story has made her a poster child for art therapy, particularly among the elderly. She was 68 and virtually suicidal after a series of knockout life events—a bad divorce, a series of electroshock treatments, and her son’s death—when at her sister’s suggestion she took a class in blind contour drawing. Shortly afterward, she began a series of 1,000 self-portraits in which she literally drew herself back to health.

During their second session, Vital Visionaries participants took an extended tour of “Golden Blessings,” which provided numerous examples and stories of elder creativity. Artist Vollis Simpson, then 60, had looked around his motor repair shop and realized that he “just had a lot of junk and had to do something with it.” He began creating an enchanted mechanical forest of gigantic whirligigs similar to his Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness, which sits on AVAM’s front plaza. At the age of 80 Harry Lieberman signed up for an art class when his chess partner didn’t show up at the senior center. By the age of 102, he was painting on five canvases at once. “At my age, you can’t wait for the paint to dry,” he once said.

In the third session, community participants shared work, including artwork and poetry, that they had created prior to this program. They then collaborated with the medical students to create “superhero” models of their teammates based on information they had gathered about each person.

The last session had all the warmth and good feeling of a final sunset ceremony at summer camp as participants showed and told, exchanged gifts, and took pictures together in AVAM’s photo booth. Community participant Gail Brooks brought in her floral interpretation of the program—an arrangement of twisted branches of a Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick tree representing the seniors, fresh young daisies representing the students, and mottled dark and light green Acuba leaves representing the combination of the two.

Students Paulette Grey and Jennifer Warner performed a song tribute to their partner called “Let’s Hear It for Lloyd,” sung to the tune of “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” from the Footloose soundtrack. Senior participant Sol Goodman read “Trilogy,” a group of three poems he wrote in tribute to the Vital Visionaries program. “You are,” he told the students in a poem called “Tenses,” “what we were/ when we were/ what you are.”

Sleep-deprived medical student Jessica Long, 23, described Vital Visionaries as “more energizing than any nap or cup of coffee.” Student Marc Callender said that the program showed him that he has much to look forward to in his own later years and hoped he would be “just like all you guys” in the group when he got older.

More than Artifacts: Positive Social Outcomes

AVAM is one of a new breed of museum, dedicated not to artifact but to action. It is dedicated to the study, collection, preservation, and exhibition of visionary art and to increasing the public’s understanding of this artistic expression. The only museum of its kind in the United States, it was designated by Congress as America’s national museum for self-taught artistry. Visionary art usually is produced by individuals without formal artistic training, whose inspiration arises from an intense personal vision that revels in the creative act itself.

The museum’s exhibitions and programs embody the thesis of Stephen E. Weil, emeritus senior scholar at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Museum Studies, that the bottom line for nonprofits is the positive social outcomes they bring about.

“If our museums are not being operated with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of people’s lives, on what [other] basis might we possibly ask for public support?” Weil asks in Perspectives on Outcome Based Evaluation for Libraries and Museums (www.imls.gov/pubs/pdf/pubobe.pdf). “Not, certainly, on the grounds that we need museums in order that museum professionals might have an opportunity to develop their skills and advance their careers, or so that those of us who enjoy museum work will have a place in which to do it. Not, certainly, on the grounds that they provide elegant venues for openings, receptions and other glamorous social events. Nor is it likely that we could successfully argue that museums . . . deserve to be supported simply as an established tradition, as a kind of ongoing habit, long after any good reasons to do so have ceased to be relevant or have long been forgotten.”

AVAM’s megaexhibitions are designed to respond to and explore community concerns such as war and peace, addiction, love, and aging—the timeless issues that face every generation. Because the museum believes that art has an unparalleled capacity to carry a message, it views each exhibition as an opportunity to change hearts and minds—that is the desired outcome.

“The Art of War and Peace: Toward an End to Hatred,” AVAM’s 2001-2002 megaexhibition, is one good example. It was reviewed on the editorial page of the Baltimore Sun, and U.S. News and World Report said that it “couldn’t have come at a more timely moment for a people trying to make sense of unthinkable loss and destruction.” A year later “High on Life: Transcending Addiction” focused attention on the fact that Baltimore has the highest heroin usage rate in the country and a youth population that is as likely to spend time in jail as graduate from high school. Visitors to the show included 5,000 people in drug treatment programs, many of whom had never been to a museum before.

The National Institute on Aging hopes to implement the Vital Visionaries program around the country, pairing museums and medical schools in other cities. “Too often, medical students only interact with ill and frail older people,” said NIA Deputy Director Judith Salerno. “The first step towards improving care for older people is to improve how medical students view them.”

Rebecca Hoffberger, AVAM’s founder and director agrees. “Can anyone imagine the good that would come from museums across the country celebrating the creativity and vibrancy of their community’s oldest citizens?” she asked. “By enlightening a new generation of physicians with first-hand knowledge that ‘old’ can mean the best, the wisest, and the most fun that one can be, our Vital Visionaries experience surpassed all our expectations and made great use of the museum as an agent of positive change.”

And while AVAM does not take credit for making Maggie Kramer walk again, she believes that Vital Visionaries eased her depression. “I think AVAM is my cure,” she said. “If I start to feel depressed I shall just think of all the lovely, accepting, giving people I met. Now I am trying to think of ways to return some of the love and friendship I left there. More than the art or exhibitions, the museum’s greatest strength is its people.”