What will your art look like when you have trouble remembering your last painting — or offspring? On the week of next, you’ll be able to sip your Cafe International espresso and ponder the answer. In the cafe’s new art installation, one-third of the pieces on the walls will be by Alzheimer patients (Tues/7).
What you can look forward to: “The pointillist and – let’s call it aboriginal flavor of some of the work can be seen as a common trait,” says Patricia Ris, co-curator of the exhibit. “Some artists will bend their vertical lines, and there seems to be a tendency toward some aspects of surrealism and superimposition. But I’m being very unscientific here.”
Ris (a creative activities coordinator at an SF adult day care center) and gerontologist-theater artist Caitlin Morgan of the Alzheimer’s Association decided to bring attention to their innovative work with seniors by integrating their art into the Care International’s regular wall fare of professional etchers and sketchers.
The pieces are created as part of a therapeutic program that allows patients to take their mind off of memory loss for a moment. With the help of an instructor, Alzheimer’s sufferers create vivid canvas evocations that can bring up elemental reactions in the viewer. In one, a red-headed woman holds a hand over her shocked face — a key indication at discomfort over what is coming out of her mouth.
Morgan also runs weekend camps for these older folk that not only give caretakers a chance to have a 24-hour period to focus on their own lives, but also give the Alzheimer’s patients a chance to try some new things. A recent NPR piece on her work highlighted Morgan’s focus on letting patients do what they feel needs to be done – telling a grandmother who insists she’s late for school that there’s no classes that day, or letting an elderly ex-carpenter work at a chair leg for the better part of an hour with invisible tools. It’s all a part of “reading between the lines,” fostering that interior mind that can seem to be in jeopardy for many people, but that is often just struggling to adjust to a new world.
“Having worked with many Alzheimer’s patients who have lost their word-finding ability, I have seen firsthand, over and over, that art is a way for them to express what words no longer can,” says Morgan, who first came into contact with senior citizen patients while she was performing with a traveling theater troupe. She says that art can be a method of alleviating frustration for those that can’t deal with early symptoms of the disease – as well as a way of describe the weird, wacky world that they are coming into contact with through their memory loss. “The connection between Alzheimer’s and art is one of necessity,” concludes Ris.
Morgan says that the work of Alzheimer’s patients probably shouldn’t be judged by the same yardsticks as other coffee shop work, that it’s primary use is that of therapy for the artist themselves. But I can imagine sitting next to Maurice’s eerie bird-woman, or Patricia’s bouquet of impressionist flowers and reflecting on an entirely different breed of cleansing: that life — even in the midst of degenerative disease — will go on and on, and in color no less.
(From top to bottom, paintings by Tamara, Maurice, and Patricia)
“Painting from the Heart: Alzheimer’s Art”
Opening reception Tues/7 6-9:30 p.m., free
Cafe International
508 Haight, SF
(415) 867-4617