By Lucas Livingston
If you've read my AgeBlog post
last year, The Healing
Power of Art, you’ll know that the topic of healthy living and
aging through arts and cultural enrichment is really taking off. Conversations
within academia go back decades connecting art enrichment with cognitive and
emotional health (see Carlson 1991 and Cohen 2000). It seems, however, in
recent years that there has been a broad upswell beyond academia in the popular
recognition that the arts can play a vital role in one's overall health regime
and museums are stepping up to the plate.
For some years, museums have been encountering
the proverbial canary in the coal mine on the imperative to address healthy
aging through arts and cultural enrichment. Eight years ago, Elizabeth Merritt,
the American Alliance of Museum’s (AAM) Vice President for Strategic Foresight
and the Founding Director of the Center for the Future of Museums, advanced the
conversation in her timely and constructive AAM blog post.
One exciting recent development has been AAM’s establishment of the Aroha
Senior Fellow for Museums and Creative Aging and the ongoing blog series Ad Summa:
Museums and Creative Aging. I look forward to bridging the
conversations between ASA and AAM in my forthcoming AgeBlog interview
with Elizabeth Merritt.
Recognizing the health and well-being benefits
of cultural enrichment and the expectations of the 21st century’s aging
population, more and more museums are embracing creative aging and lifelong
learning. One recent spike has been through the Catalyzing Creative Aging initiative. Seeking to
build capacity with arts organizations to serve older adults, the National
Guild for Community Arts Education in partnership with Lifetime Arts launched
the multi-phase Catalyzing Creative Aging initiative to
support twenty U.S. nonprofit arts organizations in the establishment of new
programs for older adults.
Particularly intriguing is the growing
collaboration between museums and the healthcare industry. A little over a year
ago, the blogosphere lit up with the announcement that doctors in Canada will
begin prescribing museum visits to their patients. A new
collaboration between the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and Médecins
francophones du Canada permits doctors to give their
patients free museum admission tickets as a form of treatment for a variety of
physical and mental health problems. It is interesting to note that this
partnership acknowledges the healing power of art for physical as well as
mental health problems. The mental benefits of arts enrichment are frequently
cited, especially in terms of reducing loneliness and social isolation.
Attending the arts for its physical benefits, while less cited, is growing
support. The Journal of Pain recently published an analysis of a decade of data
from the English
Longitudinal Study of Ageing suggesting that cultural
engagement (going to museums, art galleries, exhibitions, concerts, the
theater, or the opera) is as protective as vigorous physical activity against
the development of chronic pain among older adults.
Also noteworthy of the Montreal partnership is
that the program includes admission for the patient’s family or care partner.
This allowance recognizes the reality that a museum visit is a social
experience for many individuals. According to the 2015 National Endowment for
the Arts study When Going Gets Tough: Barriers and Motivations Affecting Arts Attendance,
surveyed U.S. adult respondents included cost (38.3%) and lack of someone with
whom to go (21.6%) as prominent barriers to participation in the arts. Although
I'm mixing the U.S. and Canada here, the Montreal initiative's inclusion of
free museum admission for families and care partners can only increase the
likelihood that a patient will “take the medicine.”
Rather ahead of the curve, the Art Institute
of Chicago has maintained a full-time staff position dedicated to older adult
education for over a quarter century. I am pleased to have held this position
for many years following the pioneering achievements of my late predecessor
Mickie Silverstein. For the past decade, the museum has partnered with Chicago
eldercare organization CJE SeniorLife on Art in the Moment, a museum-based art-therapy program for
individuals living with dementia to promote intellectual stimulation, creative
expression, social engagement, and personal validation. In recent years this collaboration has extended to the Mesulam Center
for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease of Northwestern University’s
Feinberg School of Medicine. Our cooperation with the Mesulam Center stemmed
from our mutual participation in a larger Chicago initiative, the Arts for Brain
Health Coalition (AFBHC). Bringing together music, singing,
performance, dance, visual, and studio arts, the “Arts for Brain Health
Coalition activates collaborations between healthcare and arts providers,
designing and presenting programs that use creative engagement to improve the
lives of people with memory loss and those who care for them.”
The Art Institute’s participation in AFBHC has
been transformative for my practice on a number of levels. Time and time again
I come to recognize that any service, resource, accommodation, or experience
intended for a specific population, whether with or without a disability, will
almost invariably have broader appeal and benefit for the population at large.
In my experience, I see this applying to building ramp
access, hands-on learning opportunities, arts-based health and
wellness programming, and more. This came to a head last year with the
inclusion of AFBHC at the Art Institute’s 25th Annual Reflections Festival, a celebration of
lifelong learning welcoming approximately 1,000 older adults from the greater
Chicagoland area.
On Wednesday, March 25 as part of the LEARN day
of presentations during the 2020 Aging in
America Conference, I look forward to sharing more about how the
Reflections festival has become an inclusively-designed celebration of healthy
living and aging through arts and cultural enrichment. I will join an exciting
panel of experts to address the topic of Creativity and Purpose: Using
the Arts to Reduce Social Isolation in Diverse Older Adults:
·
Tim Carpenter and
Laura Mason of the nonprofit community organization EngAGE
·
teaching artist Oshea
Luja
·
Beth Allen of Exceptional
Theater Company and Nova
Southeastern University's Lifelong Learning Institute
Our session will focus on the power of the
arts (visual, theater, literary, music, performance) to reduce social isolation
and improve the health and well-being of older adults, whether aging
healthfully, aging pathologically, or having lifelong disabilities. We will
explore some excellent strategies for infusing creative aging in one’s cultural
work and highlight the latest breakthrough research on the health and wellbeing
impact of the arts with older adults, including a soon-to-be published case study
with EngAGE and the Institute for Health & Aging at the University of
California San Francisco. I am very excited to be part of this conversation and
I hope you can join us at Aging in America on March 25!
Lucas Livingston directs the Art Institute of
antiquarian at heart, Lucas received degrees from Notre Dame and the University
of Chicago in Ancient Mediterranean Civilization and studied Egyptology at the
American University in Cairo. He lectures extensively on aspects of ancient and
Asian art and is the creator and host of the Ancient Art Podcast at
ancientartpodcast.org. In an effort not to be the first one voted off the
island, Lucas also brews beer inspired by historic recipes, narratives, and
traditions ... strictly for research, of course. He frequently presents on the
history of beer and brewing and serves on the National Advisory Board for the
Chicago Brewseum. His published research, articles, conference sessions, and
webinars can be found at https://artic.academia.edu/LucasLivingston.
Additional references
Carlson, Mary Baird (1991) Creative
Aging: A Meaning-Making Perspective. Norton and Company.
Cohen, Gene (2000) The Creative Age:
Awakening Human Potential in the Second Half of Life. Harper Collins.
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