Blog: Making Personal Connections Through Art

Since Artists' Exchange opened in 2004, it has been our focus to create opportunities for integration through art. After all, what better vehicle than art for connection, for self-discovery?

An early program called Art to Grow paired high school students with adults with developmental barriers to collaborate on a piece of art. In 2010, Karen Bouchard, Visual Arts Director and Shannon Casey, Art Teacher, came up with a journal exchange between day program artists and the members of Art Guild, an afterschool art group for local high school students. Given a series of prompts, an artist in the day program created a narrative, a drawing, a painting, an assemblage... and his/her partner responded in kind, forming a means of communication and relationship-building through art.

This year, Casey decided to match these two groups again with partners painting opposite sides of canvas panels. The artists communicated through journals to learn about their partners and to sketch and develop their plans. The day program artists completed their paintings first and the Art Guild artists drew inspiration from their partners' art for their own paintings on the reverse.

As in years past, the partners met, for the first time, at the completion of the project.

On Wednesday, the latest group of participating artists gathered at an informal potluck/cookout to celebrate the project and the unveiling of their completed pieces. The panels, rich in color and vision, flapped ceremoniously in the wind as the artists talked and connected.

During a previous project, Bouchard pointed out something these two groups have in common... both teenagers and individuals with developmental barriers can feel misunderstood and underestimated. Art gives us a place to put all of our feelings, thoughts, hopes and fears. Anything that doesn't fit in a box. And for people who feel trapped in boxes manufactured by society, their peers, their families, it offers a way out.

The journals exchanged between pairs illustrates this, with shared comments about how much they like art, how it calms them. And their paintings, full of color and life, tell a story of two artists connecting.

Mission accomplished.