Places We Practice • 231Natural Disaster and Violence
Art therapy is often part of public and private efforts to provide crisis intervention. This is
a particular form of secondary prevention, offering help to those who are in the throes of
responding to overwhelming events. Like medicating at the first sign of an infection, early
clinical intervention can sometimes prevent more serious and prolonged emotional dam-
age. Sometimes the traumatic event is a natural disaster, dislocating and frightening people
of all ages, who are often left homeless and injured.
When a devastating hurricane hit the Miami area in 1992, art therapists were on the
scene, offering their help to people in shelters. When a tornado decimated a Kansas town
in 1991, a teacher helped her students to deal with the trauma by making art. Children at a
mental health clinic in Armenia were encouraged to make pictures after a 1995 earthquake.
The therapists were able to monitor the children’s recovery by observing changes in their art
and its “colors of disaster.”^10
In recent years, art therapists have made repeated trips to New Orleans, which not only
helped the children (J), but also led to an exhibit in 2007 at the New Orleans Museum of
Art: Katrina Through the Eyes of Children (www.katrinaexhibit.org). Art therapists have
also gone to India, helping children on the mainland and on the Andaman Islands after a
devastating tsunami in 2004 wrecked their world (www.sanghaworld.org).
When a plane crash in Pittsburgh left no survivors, an art therapist helped students to deal
with their feelings through drawings (Kunkle-Miller, 1995 AATA Conference Proceedings).
When a train collided with a school bus in Israel, killing 22 and injuring 15, making art
helped youngsters cope with the trauma.^11 When a nuclear reactor core melted down on
Three Mile Island in 1979, children were invited to draw their fantasies about radiation, and
I was part of a team analyzing the drawings and planning interventions.
Children who had witnessed a shootout between the police and a radical political group
were helped to deal with their fears and feelings through art therapy (Landgarten, 1981). A
1995 terrorist bombing in Oklahoma killed or injured many innocent people. The clinician
in charge of helping the survivors to deal with their posttraumatic stress reported that art
therapy was especially helpful to people of all ages.^12 A recent edited book about art thera-
pists helping survivors of political violence is most welcome in this turbulent era in which
we live (Kalmanowitz & Lloyd, 2005).
Community Tensions
Sometimes these crises reflect racial tensions, like the riots in many American cities after
Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Children in one torn-up Washington neigh-
borhood were helped to sort out what they had witnessed by writing and illustrating a book-
let about it^13 (K). In Pittsburgh, a biracial group of artists and arts therapists got together and
worked all summer at a joint volunteer creation—the Martin Luther King Freedom School.
Classes met in a church and a neighborhood center, where people from 2 to 82 came to dance,
sing, act, paint, and sculpt—finding hope and community in shared creative activities.
In 1992, a vivid image of police brutality in Los Angeles played repeatedly on TV screens
across the country, fanning embers of resentment that burst into flaming riots following a
court decision. When groups moved in to try to contain psychological damage, art therapy
was one of the modalities used to help. Because it was so effective, the local art therapy asso-
ciation was asked by the city to write a guide for artists and teachers who volunteered their
services (Virshup, 1993). Designed to help those offering art to do so safely, the guide is use-