Places We Practice • 233Family art therapy can also be helpful to people of all ages suffering from domestic vio-
lence (Riley & Malchiodi, 2004). Battered women, a long-silent group, are finally beginning
to speak up and to be treated (Wadeson, Durkin, & Perach, 1989). Sometimes they end up
leaving abusive situations, and may be able to move “from entrapment to empowerment”
through art therapy (Virshup, 1993).
When people flee trouble at home, they sometimes end up in shelters. Art therapy, so
adaptable, portable, and allowing instant expression, is finding its way into many such new
and challenging settings. For a person whose life is in chaos, art can provide order. For
someone in a state of impermanence, art can supply something durable. So it is not surpris-
ing that people are receiving individual and group art therapy in places like soup kitchens
(Liebmann, 1996), transitional “bridge” housing programs, and shelters for the homeless
(Linesch, 1993; Virshup, 1993).
Some of the newer settings for clinical work with people in crisis, like halfway houses
and homeless shelters, are the result of changes in the psychiatric hospitals where art ther-
apy began. With the closing of many state hospitals and shortened stays in others, patients
with chronic mental illness and developmental disabilities have moved into the commu-
nity, opening new doors for art therapists. Art therapists themselves have also created new
doors, such as the open studios that have been developed in a number of urban neighbor-
hoods^14 (Q).
Displaced Persons
Like the runaway adolescents in one shelter who sorted out who they were by making masks
(Virshup, 1993), people who are dislocated are confused about their identity. Being “a
stranger in a strange land” is hard, even if the person has left a dangerous situation.
The German children who fled to Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s were fortunate to be
able to create with art therapist Edith Kramer and Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Five adult refu-
gees were lucky to make art for two hours a week with Henry Schaeffer-Simmern when they
first came to New York, as he did, fleeing the Nazis. “The unfolding of [their] artistic activ-
ity” under his guidance probably increased their self-confidence, as they adjusted to life in a
new country (Schaeffer-Simmern, 1961).
Art therapy itself has been used with many immigrants, because art is a truly univer-
sal language. For example, migrant women and their children worked together in art as a
way to be closer (McGee & Gonick-Barris, 1979 AATA Conference Proceedings). American
art therapists have helped refugees from many different places, such as the West Indies,
Cambodia, and Central America, as have our colleagues in Great Britain (Dokter, 1998) and
elsewhere, like the Netherlands (R).
Economically Disadvantaged Individuals
Another group of people who are at risk for social and emotional disorder are those who
are poor, whose stress is chronic. The artist’s role as a social change agent is not new. In
1931, a British artist named Jeannie McConnell Cannon volunteered to work with unem-
ployed miners and steelworkers in the most depressed area she could find—South Wales.
Her modest account in the Bulletin of Art Therapy (1964, p. 43) is a delight to read, and a
precursor for later efforts. As noted in Chapter 3, some artists taught in hospitals during the
Depression under the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Others worked on community arts projects, like painting wall murals in poor neighbor-
hoods (S) or teaching art to unemployed youth.