 | Art Stars volunteers Shevaun Lewis (left) and Zoe Blacksin (right) told a young patient at Yale-New Haven Hospital about the mask collection at the Yale Art Gallery and helped her to create her own. |
While making their rounds recently on a pediatrics wing at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Shevaun Lewis, Damaris Yeh and Zoë Blacksin invited a 15-year-old patient to join in a conversation about art and then create something of her own.
Although confined to her room as a precaution against contact with infectious diseases, the teenager jumped at the chance. She had been in the hospital for more than two weeks and was restless with boredom. (Her name is being withheld to protect patient confidentiality.)
The teenager sat inside the doorway of her room while Lewis, Yeh and Blacksin -- all Yale undergraduates -- talked to her from the hallway about African masks and their cultural significance, as well as about the range of masks in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery.
The Yale students are all volunteers for Art Stars, a Yale Art Gallery program at Yale-New Haven Hospital that connects Pediatrics Unit patients with art in the gallery collections and gives them an opportunity to make their own projects.
The patient responded in just the way the Yale students had hoped: In no time, she was offering up her thoughts on the photographs of several masks from the gallery's collection, collected in a binder that Lewis shared with her.
"That one is scary," the patient said of one particularly fierce-looking mask. Yeh responded by pointing out the perfect symmetry of the mask and describing the ceremonial purpose of African masks, explaining how they often represent a symbolic form, deity or spirit.
After discussing the masks in the photos, Lewis invited the young patient to make her own, and the teenager became immersed in cutting the blue construction paper that would form her mask, and then in sorting through beads, feathers, sequins, raffia and other materials to decorate it. As she worked, she joked about various possibilities for her mask, comparing her creation to those she had seen in the photos.
"Mine looks more like an alien," she declared at one point. Later she decorated it with earrings made from raffia and beads and with raffia hair. She cut out a mouth resembling a gaping hole.
"The theme for my mask is break away," said the teenager, "This is me screaming 'let me out!' because I want to get out of the hospital and go home."
As anxious as she is to depart, she passes about an hour of her time completely absorbed in her mask-making, along the way sharing stories about her family and her school.
According to Jaime Ursic, a museum educator at the Yale Art Gallery, the exchange between the student volunteers and the hospital patient is an example of how the museum extends its reach beyond the Yale campus.
"The mission of the Yale University Art Gallery is to encourage appreciation and understanding of art and its role in society through direct engagement with original art," she comments. "Art Stars is an excellent example of how active our students are in making art a part of community life beyond the galleries. Students from a variety of majors take the time to develop art projects based on works from our collections. These projects are designed to inspire the patients' spirit as well as help refine observation skills and hand-eye coordination."
Lewis, a junior, and seniors Yeh and Blacksin are among more than a dozen Yale College students who volunteer for Art Stars, which was initiated last spring by recent Yale graduate Ming Thompson '04 when she served as a gallery guide and volunteer. Once a week, trained student volunteers travel to the hospital's Pediatrics Unit for two-hour sessions with patients ages 6 to 18, meeting as a group in a general activities room, or in patients' rooms (in the case of patients who are too ill to leave rooms or beds).
In these sessions, the Yale volunteers show photographs from the gallery collections related to a particular theme, and then invite the young patients to craft their own piece of art around that topic.
In addition to African masks, other themes covered by the volunteers include Greek pottery, stained glass windows and furniture (specifically chairs from colonial to modern times). With some of the older patients, they sometimes introduce more complex concepts, such as negative space, and with younger patients they may incorporate a story. For example, the popular children's story "Anansi the Spider," a retelling of a traditional Ashanti tale that originated in Ghana, West Africa, complements the African mask theme.
"We try to span different periods in history with our themes but like to connect the art we are looking at to things that the kids know," says Yeh, who is both an Art Star volunteer and the Yale Art Gallery's community outreach coordinator. "For our project on Greek pottery, for example, we will discuss Zeus and other Greek mythological characters, and then talk to children about their own superheroes. It helps to make the art more accessible to them."
For the children, actually crafting their own project is especially fun, says Lewis, who is this year's coordinator of Art Stars. Projects have included making a miniature wooden chair in conjunction with exploring furniture in the gallery's collection; decorating a small wooden treasure chest in connection with the theme of Mayan art; and fashioning a stained glass window out of construction and tissue paper during a session examining the artistry of stained glass windows.
"The kids appreciate having something that they've made themselves that they can then take back to their rooms," comments Lewis. "Sometimes they'll use their artwork to decorate what is generally a rather drab space, and it cheers them up. Something like the treasure chest is very popular with the kids because they have fun just thinking about what to put in it."
Beyond the educational and therapeutic benefits of the hands-on exploration of art, the Art Stars program also helps the families of the patients, Lewis notes.
"The children's parents can take a break while we are engaging the children in a project for a short time," she explains. "And sometimes, our patients' siblings might join in on our session. Occasionally, the parents -- some of whom have been spending long hours sitting at their child's bedside -- have joined in on the discussion or have wanted to do the hands-on project themselves."
All of the Yale students have volunteer training through Yale-New Haven Hospital as well as gallery training. They each receive Art Stars binders with fact sheets, photos and other information about the gallery objects related to the Art Stars themes, and some are very familiar with the gallery's collections in general, having served as gallery tour guides. (Yeh and Blacksin are also volunteer gallery guides.) While all the volunteers have an interest in art and a desire to share it with others, most are not majoring in art at Yale.
"Our Art Stars volunteers are very diverse in their majors and goals," notes Yeh, who is majoring in biology and plans to attend medical school. Lewis is majoring in cognitive science, and Blacksin is majoring in art history but plans to go to medical school.
"For me, Art Stars is great because it allows me to combine my interest in art and medicine," says Blacksin, noting that she has been able to witness regularly the goings-on in a medical environment. (The students are not privy to information on the patients' health issues.) For Lewis, who works in a Yale research lab investigating issues relating to children and drawing, her work with Art Stars allows her to be with children and show them art for the sheer pleasure of it.
"I love kids and want to work with them," comments Lewis, who stayed in New Haven over the past summer to work and, along with Yeh, volunteered for the Art Stars program during the summer break.
Lewis, Yeh and other volunteers say that they are always happy when there are a large group of children interested in taking part in each week's Art Stars project, but admit that they are sometimes equally happy when they have few.
"Every once and awhile, when we get to the hospital there aren't any patients for us to work with," says Yeh. "On the one hand, we feel disappointed that we can't share art with anyone, but on the other hand, we are happy that there aren't too many sick kids."
Lewis and the other volunteers are currently exploring new ideas for Art Stars themes built around specific gallery objects, and say that the program has become more structured in its second semester. New volunteers are always welcome, they note.
"They are a very dedicated group with great skills," says Janice Baker, the coordinator of arts and enrichment at the Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital and the Art Stars hospital liaison, of the Art Stars volunteers. "The kids here really like the projects, which allow them to be pretty expressive and creative."
The teenaged patient confined to her hospital room agreed that her visit with the Yale volunteers was a great diversion
"I like my mask," she said of her new creation, which developed into something bearing some resemblance to the African masks from the gallery's collection but was also a product of her own imagination.
Her eyes widened as a new thought popped into her head, and she looked up mischievously at the Art Stars volunteers. "Hey," she announced cunningly, "If I put this on, no one would know it was me if I walk out of my room and sneak out of here."
-- By Susan Gonzalez
T H I S
Art Stars program brings a twinkle
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