By: Marie Jen Galilo, Staff Writer
Many people are afraid of growing old because they fear its features, including changes in physical appearance and cognitive abilities as well as social isolation. Art can help us reframe our perspective on aging and learn to view it as a gift. The Arts & Health: Healthy Aging Through the Arts project creates collaborative spaces where seniors and Indigenous Elders work with artists to explore different art media. To learn more about this initiative, The Peak corresponded with its coordinator, Caroline Liffmann.
Arts & Health is a Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation project, in partnership with Vancouver Coastal Health, and local organizations. The project was founded 20 years ago and was influenced by Dr. Gene Cohen’s research on creative aging, the use of art-based learning and community-building to promote healthy aging in seniors. His research showed that seniors who participated in art programs exhibited “reduced chronic pain, reduced stress and anxiety, increased brain connections.” In the project’s first three years, the UBC School of Nursing conducted a study on its impacts on senior health, and found that seniors in arts programs had “increased social connections.”
“One participant this year shared how grateful she was for the project and the group, because she usually leaves her apartment just twice a week — once to get groceries, and once to come to her weekly Arts and Health group,” Liffmann shared.
There are currently five active Arts & Health programs in which artists and participants work together on a variety of projects, including “digital storytelling, memoir, beading, improv theatre, screen printing, and contemporary dance practices.” Even after the program ends, participants stay connected and continue making meaningful art. This year, a group of such participants who worked on a project 20 years ago called “Queer Imaging and Riting Kollective for Elders” received an award from SFU’s Gerontology Research Centre. Achievements like this show the lifelong impacts of practicing creative aging through arts, both for individual empowerment and to society at large.
Arts & Health aims to empower seniors by letting them lead the creation of their own art through which they “explore issues and ideas that are important to them.” In a Strathcona Community Centre puppetry project, for instance, the participants “didn’t think of themselves as artists initially,” but they “became more confident and vocal about their interests, beginning to take on more leadership roles,” and used puppetry to share their “experiences of war as children.” Liffmann shared a testimonial from one of the participants: “Arts & Health brings out our happiness and sadness. It helps us recollect our memories, life experiences and individual stories, with laughter and tears. We forget our age, health limits, and pain . . . we support each other.”
As I watch time turn the hairs on my parents’ and loved ones’ grey, knowing there are community-based support networks that will help them navigate this stage of their life gives us the reassurance we need to enjoy the present and remain hopeful for what the future will bring.
After seeing the positive impact that art has on the health and well-being of seniors and Elders, Liffmann views arts as “a way to process the information of our life experiences, and to express and imagine ideas, memories, futures, heartbreaks, complexities, fragments, joys, and new possibilities, large and small.” As I watch time turn the hairs on my parents and loved ones grey, I worry about how to support them as they age. Knowing there are community-based support networks that will help them navigate this stage of their life gives us the reassurance we need to enjoy the present and remain hopeful for what the future will bring.
