History • 61Other Art Therapy Pioneers in the United States
Actually, one of the odd things about art therapy is that, since it was indeed an idea whose
time had come, Naumburg and Kramer were not the only American pioneers. In fact, as art
therapy came to be better known, many individuals in different places appear to have given
birth to remarkably similar ideas around the same time, often unknown to one another. In
other words, it seemed—after there was better communication—that there were quite a few
people doing “art therapy,” sometimes even calling it by the same name (DVD 3.12).
Often there was another individual, one who already had recognized credentials, who
opened or widened the door for the neophyte art therapist. Elinor Ulman (A), for example,
had a friend in artist/psychologist Bernard Levy, with whom she worked at DC General
Hospital during the 1950s (B). He helped her start the first journal in the field, as well as an
early training program at George Washington University, where he was Chairman of the
Psychology Department. The three East Coast pioneers were well known, primarily because
Naumburg and Kramer wrote the first books, and Ulman published seminal articles in the
Bulletin of Art Therapy, some of which she later collected in two edited books (Ulman &
Dachinger, 1975; Ulman & Levy, 1981).
There were also other art therapy trailblazers who had toiled in the hinterlands for many
years prior to finding one another. With the soil so fertile in the predominantly psychoanalytic
world of mental health, and in the “progressive” domain of education, artists and teachers
doing something therapeutic were to be found in the Midwest as well as in the East.
Although the Menninger Clinic was in the wide open prairie of Kansas, it was and
remains one of the most sophisticated psychiatric treatment centers in the world (now
located at Baylor University in Texas) (C). Because of the vision of the founding family, it
pioneered in all of the activity therapies. From 1935 to 1937, an artist named Mary Huntoon
(D) was invited by Dr. Karl Menninger to offer classes in painting and drawing to psychiat-
ric patients (Figure 3.9). In 1946 Menninger asked Huntoon to organize one of the first art
therapy studios in the United States, at the new Winter Veterans Administration Hospital,
also in Topeka, Kansas.
Figure 3.9 Mary Huntoon painting at an easel.