UIC

UIC has a beautiful campus! Even on a gross day it looks really pretty. I took this picture when I was visiting the campus for an artist's lecture by Kara Walker.

Bouquet

On my last day of my internship we had an art festival, where we (interns) were thanked with bouquets. I came home and split up the bouquet into smaller vases to keep around the house.

חיים

Maybe it's lame but I titled this piece "חיים" which means "life" in Hebrew. I gave it that title because I was thinking about how the word chayim is plural, and there is no singular form of that word, and what the implications are. Our lives are made up of many different parts, different "lives," which we all have to integrate into our one life, our one word.

I made this piece after thinking a lot and before writing a paper on this topic. I interviewed artist Tobi Kahn before writing to hear what he had to say. I wish I could transcribe the interview and post it, but the recording program I used to capture our conversation through skype made this horrible static on the recording and I can't really hear it very well. I was able to sit through it to get most of what he was saying, but not enough for a word-for-word translation.

Anyway, that's my art post for now!

View of winter...

To remind myself of how it was, so I am grateful for the 60s and rainy weather in May. At least today doesn't have a high of -2, like in January, right?

I owe this blog some good posts. Here I am making art almost every day and sharing almost none of it. Maybe during the break I will take pictures and scan and update like a mad lady.

My Thesis Idea

Well I won't get into the actual idea lest one of you savvy readers steals it (one of the three of you maybe who read me haha).

So JewishGal - me - was going to do a nice Jewish thesis project. Cultural identity formation through art making in the Jewish community.

I have been having identity crisis things lately.

I was offered an internship at an LGBT site working with youth and I took it and now I am really excited about gender issues. I interviewed there because I heard it was a great site and I felt like it would be a challenge to work in a completely different community. And now all I want to read is about gender identity and "special issues" in the LGBT community. I spent the last two days of Passover reading about gender issues in art therapy... for fun! Not for class or any assignment. Who knew I would get so excited about it? There is something SO refreshing about talking about something else - for once - that I am really interested in and feel somehow personally involved in. There are enough similarities that I feel I can identify with some of the struggles that they are going through and I have friends and family members who have most likely dealt with the things I am reading about.

So I've thought about it and I'm definitely changing my population to be with LGBT, and my internship advisor thinks that is great and would broaden my horizons, so that is that!

This is part of the Jewish identity crisis I am going through right now, I think: my sudden and excited change in community of study. Do I have to talk about being Jewish all the time? Do I have to label myself as a Jew? Can it be an important part of my identity in a different way? As I become more observant, I feel like it's less important to talk about it all the time. I've recently added another mitzvah and then I went through another crisis ... am I egalitarian, and if I am, what does that look like for me?

OH it's very complicated. I should be making art about it. Instead it runs around in circles in my head and doesn't go anywhere. I guess that's why I'm still in crisis. Need to make some art about being Jewish and talk about how I'm Jewish and don't need to talk about being Jewish.

Meanwhile, I will happily keep my Jewish identity crisis out of my thesis.

Art = Child's Play?

Something that is so frustrating that I am coming upon again and again is that art is for children. It makes me SO frustrated.

"Oh you're an art therapist?? I use art sometimes when I work with kids!" Or "who do you do art therapy with? mostly kids, right?"

VERY FRUSTRATING.

I can't go into this right now because I am working on my research proposal that's due tomorrow and I haven't written the literature review section. However I am making good headway I guess. Hopefully I will be done in about 3 hours. Eek.

Flowers

Today's Response

I haven't posted art here in a while but I also haven't taken pictures of anything I've done in a while.

Today was a particularly hard day.

Here is my response art.

My Body is Political

This was my submission to a Jewish-Muslim Interfaith art and music dialogue event. It's hard to describe what the event was exactly supposed to be like, but Jews and Muslims get together and watch short films about being Jewish or Muslim, listen to some music inspired by common heritage, have some conversations, etc. This time they added an art show, so I submitted, the prompt was "your Jewish or Muslim identity," basically.

So I made this mandala (I am into mandalas lately, not interpreting them but making them, after researching mandalas for a class assignment a few weeks ago). It took me a couple of days, it's pretty large and I made it with only pen and filled in some of the spaces with marker because that would have been crazy to fill it in with pen - usually when I make smaller mandalas like this I only use pen. I wrote something about mandalas being the universal symbol of wholeness and completion, and how mine is growing and being shaped by experience.

I then put it on display at the interfaith dialogue with markers and a sign that encouraged people to participate in my Jewish identity, since I am influenced by people I meet and my experiences.

It was interesting to watch people decide whether or not to make a mark.


But then some people got really into it. There was a pretty steady stream of people adding to my work throughout the evening.


This girl spent the most time working on it, she was very serious about it.


If you step back and look at it, it really is quite beautiful. This is what it looked like at the end of the night (or, rather, when I decided to leave, I just couldn't stay any longer).


But then, look closer:


"FREE GAZA."

That person may as well have written "KIKE" on it.

So much for peaceful interfaith dialogue.

Someone responded to it on my work by writing "Love" and "Tolerance" on different areas. Someone else then saw my work as a political forum and made some references to gay rights.

And the thing that really gets me is that they put it inside a hamsa, which is a shared symbol by many middle eastern cultures including Judaism and Islam, although I wonder if the person who wrote that knew that.

It just goes to show you that art brings out the truth. Nobody would have said that out loud at the dialogue, but it was there, and it came out the instant someone was allowed to make art about it. This was the first example of someone writing text on my piece, the first time someone felt their own individuality was more important than contributing to my identity, and the first person to make a violent statement against me - on my own art.

This is how I am seen. My very presence is political. I am Jewish, therefore I am an oppressor, therefore I am racist, therefore I have some kind of power. It was a personal message to me as a Jew. I get that it was a public stunt because the ability to write was there, but this was a personal artwork about me and my Jewish identity. Not about someone else's political agenda.

I tried to go home and do other work but I just couldn't. So I made some response art (yay art therapy grad student nerd). I worked for 20 minutes while listening to music and then wrote about it:

Betrayed
I bared myself, made vulnerable
Stabbed
So quickly
So easily
So thoughtlessly.
Using me for your own purpose.
It was never about our relationship, only quick satisfaction for you.
You didn't even know me and felt free to use me.
Your presence is a sham.
Go home.
I don't have to justify myself to you,
Nameless viewer.
No wonder things are the way they are.

We're Mentally Ill, Not Stupid!!!

UGH. I don't know where else to put this rant so it's going in my art blog, here.

I am an intern at a site for adults recovering from severe mental illness (for example, schizophrenia). Recovering means they are currently undergoing several forms of therapy, including talk therapy and psychopharmacological (is that a word?) therapy, as well as seeing a social worker who helps them to find jobs and stable housing. Some also live in group homes which are also overseen by the organization. These clients are not called clients, they are members of a community, because they actually work hand-in-hand with staff on many levels to run the organization. Participation is mostly voluntary, although they do sign a contract when becoming members to participate at a specified level.

Anyway. These are adults who are working at becoming part of "normal" society again, after maybe having been isolated for a period of time due to their illness. In a way it's not much different than someone with a physical illness like cancer. When you see a person in remission, you might not know they had cancer, like you might not know that someone from our organization is struggling with a mental illness. And just because someone is in remission from cancer doesn't mean they're stupid, right?

It's so frustrating! I know these people personally and like them very much already. We hang out, make art, and learn about each other. We relate as people and as therapy participators.

And then we go on trips where the docent of the art gallery or the art studio facilitator treats them like children. I am not observing this, I am feeling it because I am also being treated as a child, since I am walking with and talking to the people in the group it is assumed I must also be mentally ill and therefore stupid.

Many of the members of this organization were fully functioning members of society until that moment that it happened: a psychotic break, a major depressive episode, a mania with psychotic features, or whatever you can find recorded in their charts. Some people went traveling, studied abroad, when to art school, were lawyers, got good grades in high school, you name it. Something happened and it all fell apart. They are still those people, but now they are dealing with something that makes doing everything they used to do so much harder. And medications just add another layer of complication to that - it can stop symptoms but make someone gain weight, feel tired all the time, or even make them twitch in ways that freak people out. But they are still those people they were!

I understand that some people with mental illness also have cognitive disabilities or other things that might make their mental processing not move quite as quickly as some others. I don't know. But what I do know is, beginning with the assumption that someone who is mentally ill can't understand you or can't handle something without asking them and seeing how they respond is insulting and maybe lazy :(

(OK remember I am new at this and not jaded yet)

Blah. It makes me so mad. I don't know what to do about it. I just feel helpless and embarrassed - when the docent says something like "have you ever heard of the Renaissance?" I just feel so horrible.