Patti's Blog - Advocate for Elders, People with Disabilities and Their Families

Art exhibit helps artists with disabilities

Excerpt from: WZZM 13 (click for full article)

 

 

Brain-injury survivors, including war and sports victims, are honored in exhibit

Excerpt from: The Washington Post (click for full article)

 

Hemorrhages, blunt-force trauma and bullet wounds don’t exactly scream “art.” But in a new exhibit, the National Museum of Health and Medicine is honoring men and women who survived such traumatic brain injuries (TBI).

The temporary exhibit — titled “Whack’ed . . . and then everything was different” — expands on the museum’s standing TBI installation, which showcases human brain specimens as well as medical tools used for surgery, treatment and rehabilitation. Artist and TBI survivor Eliette Markhbein created the larger-than-life portrait series to raise awareness of TBIs.

Why Some Sighted People Think Its OK to Demean the Blind In Art: A Top Ten List

Excerpt from: Planet of the Blind (click for full article)

 

10.   Blindness must be a ticket to utter existential misery and though I may not know any blind people, I know misery. In fact, I’m such a wretch already, if I lost mysight I’d have to kill myself. 

 

9.     Therefore blindness equals death. Since no one knows what real death is like, blindness will have to do. This is easy because I don’t know any real blind people anyway.

 

8.     I saw a blind person once and he was begging outside of Bloomingdales. Ergo, all blind people are in extraordinary existential misery. I will call them “the blind” without comic irony.

        Again, I don’t know any real blind people. 

 

7.     God made blind people as exemplary models of spiritual longing. Clunk clunk, here comes Jesus with some gooey mud.  

 

6.     Blind people may have compensatory powers like Tiresias. That’s because although God punishes them, sometimes he takes an almost inexplicable liking to one or two of them. 

 

5.     This is easy because I don’t know any real blind people anyway. Art for art’s sake. 

 

4.     Blind people in particular and disabled people in general are not part of the true diversity. Don’t compare crippled people (defective, lame, retarded, deaf, whatever you want to call yourselves…)

        with my able bodied sisters and brothers.

 

3.     If you’re that way, well, you probably deserve it.

 

2.     I don’t know any real blind people but I’ll bet they’re defective in all kinds of ways, hence, perfect for protean cliches about angst.  

 

1.     I think the blind tune pianos? But they’re not real artists, or Ph.Ds, or professors, or opera singers. I mean, I’ve never met one, have you?

Peckham & MSU Create Art Program For Workers With Disabilities

Excerpt from: WILX.com (click for full article)

 

Donni Cee always liked to draw. But for most of his life, he hid his talent from the people around him. "When they encountered me it sort of surprised them... they were not used to somebody who wanted to embrace their inner child, somebody who wanted to enjoy their life, so as a result I was mocked and ridiculed," said Cee.

But three years ago Peckham's "Art at Work" program changed all of that. Donni began taking art classes while at work, honing his skills and openly exercising his imagination. Donni's drawing is one of 100 works of art that now hang proudly in the Peckham work space.

"Just as important as looking at the wall... seeing them look at their own artwork and their own pieces on the wall was nothing short of incredible," said Sue McGuire, the Peckham Art Program Developer.

"I thought I was just a retarded idiot that was destined to push a mop and be mocked, ridiculed. So when art from the heart actually revealed itself in the sneak peak that a lot of the artists such as myself went to, me and Dominique Johnson, another client artist, we were in tears. We were not used to people doing that for us. "

Artists with disabilities work with surrogates to fulfill their visions

Excerpt from: jacksonville.com (click for full article)

 

Through The Arc of Jacksonville, an organization that helps people with physical and mental challenges, Melanie Coughlin volunteers to paint for people weekly. Those who ask her to paint for them don’t have to pay anything. They just need to contact The Arc and make an appointment.

At the Haskell Building downtown, dozens gathered with wine and shrimp and checkbooks to buy some of the art for the seventh annual Artistic Realization Technologies exhibition. Mayor Alvin Brown said he’d already seen one of Adam Coughlin’s paintings at City Hall.

Preston Haskell, of the Haskell Co. and namesake of the building, said he’d already bought two paintings by 6:30 p.m., only a half-hour into the event.

The art varied considerably. Coughlin’s paintings consisted mostly of geometric shapes. A giant blue ball with a red line going through it on top of a pale yellow background. A darker blue triangle that looks like a javelin soars above it.

Millersville University seeks to open doors for people with disabilities into arts programs

Excerpt from: Lancaster Online (clcik for full article)

 

Millersville University is engaging new audiences in the performing arts, with a goal of increasing accessibility for all.

The university — which recently received a $23,500 grant through a partnership of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and the MetLife Foundation — is developing projects that go beyond conventional audience-engagement strategies.

The university was one of six grantees selected from a highly competitive pool of more than 60 applicants that proposed cutting-edge plans to increase local community participation in the arts.

Funds from the grant will benefit the university's Tear Down This Wall initiative, a multifaceted disability arts program that includes a mixture of professional art, participatory arts opportunities and art education.

To that end, the university on Monday hosted a community forum — titled Disability and The Arts — designed to bring together artists, advocates and community organizers to envision how to effectively incorporate people with disabilities into public arts and humanities programs.

Heart of Autism

Excerpt from: Autism Speaks (click for full article)

 

Tyler Bell is a perfect example. Tyler is a 20-year-old accomplished artist from central New Jersey, and an engaged member of his local community. At a young age, Tyler started showing an interest in identifying and mixing colors, which in turn developed into a love of watercolors. By middle school, painting had become one of his preferred free time choices and his paintings papered the walls of his classroom. It was after a person-centered planning session in high school that his team pushed for more structured painting time as a possible job or leisure skill exploration. Tyler’s parents found a local artist who was willing to paint with him. He quickly began to love heading into a studio and painting with an instructor who soon became both a mentor and a friend.

Today, Tyler’s paintings cover more than just the walls of the Bell’s home in New Jersey. Many of Tyler's paintings hang in various retail and restaurant establishments within their community. Recently, three paintings sold off the walls of a local restaurant, and another was sold to an Autism Speaks volunteer who saw the beautiful paintings online. Tyler’s sales came to a total of $1,170. While most young men his age would head straight to a video game shop, the closest Nike store, or Amazon.com, Tyler so generously donated his sales to AutismCares, a grant program at Autism Speaks that helps individuals with autism and their families affected by financial difficulties or natural disasters. After Hurricane Sandy, Tyler’s family was without power, water and heat for several days, so AutismCares was a very natural place for his donation when he learned that life did not return to normal for everyone so quickly. The proceeds from Tyler’s art will go toward providing food, clothing or shelter to families who experienced dramatic or lasting effects of the storm.

Artistry on display

Excerpt from: Carroll County Times (click for full article)

 

Wiley Purkey, of Eldersburg, is sharing his lifelong love of art with his community.

A number of Purkey’s works are being shown at the Sykesville Gate House Museum of History through the end of 2012. The art on display is not for sale, but Purkey has four different prints available for purchase, with all proceeds going to support the museum.

The Sykesville Gate House Museum is among several buildings in Sykesville being examined regarding compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The exhibit includes a range of works, from oil paintings to linoleum block prints to sketches to watercolors. “I’ve been doing it for 46 years, so when you get bored, you just move on to some other medium and keep on going,” Purkey said. “I work on five or six things at a time, so if I reach an impasse about what I want to do and I’m not quite sure where I’m going, I take it off the easel or the table, and I grab another board or one I’ve been working on, and I just start working on that. I rotate through these panels until I get one finished and then another.”

Purkey, 59, has sketched since childhood and started painting with oil paints at age 13. He said, “Being born in Ellicott City and then moving to Sykesville gives you an appreciation for history and architecture, and almost all of my work is architecture or garden.”

Purkey credits the late Thelma Wimmer, of Sykesville, for inspiring his love of gardening, including a large triptych of her garden in the show done in oils. He remembered his friend: “She was an avid, avid gardener. She weeded it all the time; it was an amazingly weed-free garden. She had poppies, a cherry tree, wisteria, iris — endless iris. She was the creator of [the] museum in the Sykesville Town House, which became this museum.”

Purkey gave credit to another woman, Claudia Purkey, his wife of 27 years. “She, in so many ways, is my secret weapon, because people say to me, ‘How do you produce so much?’ It is because she’s active. She makes her own life, because she knows that, frequently, I’m going to be in the studio. And she’s just so encouraging and supportive and takes up the slack, when I’m elsewhere. She knows that there’s no one else for me, besides the art. She’s the reason for me that I’ve been able to do so much for so long — 27 years of it, anyway.”