Art & Healing: Part 3

If you used Calgary's public transit system over the last year or two, you might have noticed deeply personal artwork about mental health – things like addiction, depression or bipolar disorder.

The work, mostly collaged or drawn, often with hand-written messages like “you don’t know how strong you are” or “you are more than a pill,” were created by people from all walks of life as part of an innovative public art project commissioned by the City of Calgary.

Organized by Calgary artist Dick Averns, Recognition... Validation... Reassurance... followed the tenets of social practice – where art is made by ordinary folks, both for themselves and for the benefit of the larger community.

• Related: ART & HEALING: Part 1 and  ART & HEALING: Part 2

In all, some 200 people attended workshops where they shared their feelings through art, creating works that were later displayed in public to help promote conversations about mental health. 

“Seeing people’s art circulated in multiple pop-up exhibitions, as well as three gallery installations and then billboards, transit-stop posters and mobile galleries on buses and trains, was a huge boon for everyone involved,” says Averns.

The project, brought to life in a video produced by the City of Calgary, was completed before COVID-19 introduced the concept of social distancing, but it remains deeply relevant amidst a deepening health crisis that has strained people’s coping skills, sometimes to the breaking point.

Key messages are that art can play an important role in wellness not only through the visualization of private emotions but by giving a voice to people whose realities are rarely shared. 

Averns went on to win the 2020 Mayor’s Award for Healing Through the Arts, one of the country’s most notable awards for art that addresses wellness through art.  But, more importantly, the project has continued to spur other community mental health initiatives. 

---

Galleries West editor Portia Priegert conducted a recent interview by email with Dick Averns. Their exchange is lightly edited for clarity and length.

---

Getting this project to the launching point was a major undertaking, let alone completing the actual project itself. Perhaps you can start by outlining how the process unfolded. Did you know you wanted to focus on mental wellness right from the start?

A call for submissions was circulated in 2016 through a collaboration between the City of Calgary’s public art program and the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta University of the Arts. It offered artists mentorship, skill-development in social practice, and the opportunity to create personal projects for an exhibition at the gallery. One project would be selected for a public art award, with a budget of $50,000.

Initially, I was interested but unsure. Other artists encouraged me to apply, notably Mireille Perron. I’d written a nomination letter for her several years earlier – she became the first Francophone artist laureate in Calgary in 2012 – and it then it seemed like yes, I should give it a whirl. Applications were juried, based on a small portfolio of previous work and a letter of interest.

There was no requirement for submission of a concept, but I knew from having undertaken many public art projects that I desired to work more closely with audiences in ways that may foster community wellness. I did have the theme of mental health in my back pocket, but other than that the content didn’t take shape until we started the workshops.

The mentorship by three international artists – Alfredo Jaar, Tania Bruguera and Jeanne van Heeswijk – was a vital part of the process. What advice did you take from them and how did it help you move forward? 

Without a doubt, being able to attend lectures by world-renowned artists over a period of several months, and then be part of a weekend workshop with just half a dozen participants … wow! What a learning experience!

I’d known of Alfredo Jaar since first seeing his installation The Eyes of Gutete Emerita years ago in New York City. This simple but profoundly alluring work was laden with powerful content that made it hard to look away. He became an influence for me based on his use of lens-based media and sculpture and also his community relevance: putting art in the service of politically charged but widely accessible projects. 

Alfredo was quiet, modest, and confronted everyone’s perceptions of what they thought they knew about what was going on in the world. We were asked how much we thought we were engaged with local, national and international affairs, how often we were online, and what we’d read or studied. Having to share our self-evaluations was challenging and revealing: none of us knew close to what we thought we did. 

Alfredo also imparted the importance of not preconceiving a project before engaging with a particular community, saying the process of engagement should not be forced or overly restricted by time constraints. The latter was incredibly salient: our workshops ran from November to February, but we had to develop a public art proposal and maquette for exhibition by April. There were no community groups assigned or in the wings, so we had to build relationships that could bear fruit.

With Tania Bruguera, I knew of her work primarily from her Tate Modern project addressing community relations through ethnicity, participant surveys and the deployment of mounted police in the gallery. Upon meeting her, it was clear she is passionate about art as a community good, but in a very down-to-earth manner. In the workshop, we were required to share our emergent project ideas amongst one another, followed by a rigorous process of critique.

Tania imparted the importance of not unintentionally instrumentalizing community participants and finding, instead, a way to facilitate a process whereby others shape the content of the art, i.e., not having a lead artist as the director. 

Jeanne van Heeswijk was the one artist with whom I was not familiar. Hearing of her work with marginalized communities – and her practice of not accepting a fee higher than minimum wage if that’s what community participants were living on – was eye opening. Many of her projects were longterm and required incredible commitment and self-sacrifice. 

From working alongside Jeanne, it was clear that nothing should be taken for granted when working with marginalized communities. Building trust is a key factor that will help determine the overall success of a project. 

I’m interested in your perspectives on social practice. First, how do you define social practice? What particular value do you see in it versus the myriad of other creative approaches in contemporary art? 

Personally, I define social practice as any art form made in a community, whereby community participants shape the content of the art both for themselves and for the benefit of a broader community. Socially engaged art is another related term. The Tate’s online glossary notes that “the participatory element of socially engaged practice, is key, with the artworks created often holding equal or less importance to the collaborative act of creating them.”

The value here is that participants are determining the content of the art: something that is not always the case with community art, where you may have people simply participating by way of assisting or collaborating with an artist (or team) in a community-based setting. And similarly, with relational aesthetics, although the process of exchange between artwork and audience may be the object of art, or have more value than a singular art object, the audience is not necessarily responsible for authoring the content.

Community art has been around for years and, in the United States, the term social sculpture has had traction for a long time. But with social practice there is a new credence as it breaks down borders and is, by design, intended to be much less hierarchical and directly support community wellness.

Public art is also relevant, in that social practice is reliant on public involvement. But of course, not all public art is social practice!

How did you reach out to engage people living with mental health challenges? Were there hurdles to overcome? 

Before addressing the process, let’s face it: everyone has mental health!

Yes, there was lots of legwork making pitches to mental health organizations and community groups. This required a well-drafted proposal, lots of time to make calls and attend meetings, an abundance of energy to sustain the canvassing, and then patience in allowing potential collaborators to make decisions.

I was keen to find a balance of demographics and a range of geographical locations across Calgary, so the resultant art works and content were indicative of a broad mix of individuals. Most of all, it’s important to recognize that everyone is at risk from mental distress, so I wanted to go beyond catering only to mental health organizations, where the initiated may already be receiving support.

In fact, it was important for me to find people who may not have sought help with mental wellness. From my work as a full-time post-secondary instructor, I knew there was data that identifies students as being at risk, so this demographic was an initial focus. 

In the end, I worked with more than a dozen organizations and offered free workshops for both students and members of the public, as well as discrete groups. All groups were considered partners or collaborators. I commenced with two pilot workshops in the Illingworth Kerr Gallery – one for students and the other open to the public – and two workshops for the University of Calgary student club for mental health awareness. 

Once my prototype was selected by the jury as the winning project, I worked with diverse community collaborators: the Fresh Start Recovery Centre, the Sheldon Chumir Health Centre. the EmergeHUB Co-Working Space, the SPARK Disability Art Festival, multiple University of Calgary stakeholders, and the Mathison Centre for Mental Health Research and Education, which hosted a workshop for healthcare workers at Foothills Hospital.

Ongoing support from producers and community partners was key. The City of Calgary’s public art program, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, the Alberta University of the Arts, Calgary Transit, the University of Calgary and the Pattison Sign Group were all central collaborators.

So, without a doubt, I certainly couldn’t have completed this project without the buy-in and support of so many community groups. That said, the project wasn’t just predicated upon marketing, administration and project management. Every workshop, pop-up exhibition or community meeting required a lot of soul-searching. 

Openness about one’s own mental health, honesty, laying vulnerability on the table, and building trust were the foundations for community engagement, creative collaboration and the production of hundreds of artworks.

In terms of hurdles, the sheer amount of work and logistical planning was certainly an eye-opener and sleep-raider. Undertaking a public art project with public funding can entail a high level of scrutiny and paperwork for managing workflow. 

I was blessed to have the support of the University of Calgary at the outset, as I was a full-time faculty member. Transitioning from a predominantly teaching career to curating and more community work presented an interruption and delay in the project and some data analysis is still to be completed. Another challenge was a legal review by the City of Calgary, initiated because another public art project, totally unconnected to my work, had appropriated images in a manner that didn’t meet with the city’s approval.

One could say, be careful what you wish for!

A socially engaged project like this must have raised issues that artists usually do not face. I’m thinking here of the risk that someone might be triggered in a workshop, for example, as well as things like ensuring confidentiality. How did you navigate these issues?

The points you raise are really important: essential questions, i.e., questions that are relevant, necessary and indispensable. To ensure my project was structured from the outset with rigour and appropriate ethical checks and balances, I created a research team of advisors and experts. It included Sonya Jakubec, a doctor of nursing with expertise in community health; Jewel Loewen, a registered art therapist and counsellor; and Shannon MacKinnon, a social worker and practising artist. Their input helped ensure I structured the workshops appropriately, had supports in place for participants, and provided me with invaluable moral support.

Additionally, I conducted the overall program as not just a social practice public artwork, but as an applied research project. This entailed applying for, and receiving, a certificate of institutional ethical review, granted by a nationally accredited research ethics board.

Examples of ethical oversight included confidentiality clauses, appropriate storage of data, health support during workshops (having, for instance, a separate quiet room available in case of need) and ensuring participants gave informed consent. We also provided handouts with a comprehensive listing of health supports, including walk-in clinics, addiction services and a free 24-hour distress line.

What advice would you give others planning a similar project? Are there things, in retrospect, you would have approached differently? 

There’s lots I could share here. Firstly, when setting up a project like this, be sure to plan, plan again, and then plan some more. Be sure to allow plenty of time to develop genuine community partnerships that enable participants to shape the content.

My initial proposal was to run 25 workshops, or one per week for six months. This was way too ambitious and, fortunately, public art program coordinator Ola Wlusek recognized this and encouraged a more streamlined approach. The project still involved more than a dozen workshops and multiple pop-up exhibitions. In trying to build capacity and a public profile, each exhibition required promotion and marketing, for which much of the design work was my responsibility. Next time I’d build a marketing assistant into the budget!

Certainly, I wasn’t naïve about the need for hands-on support, and I did have a budget for a project assistant, and also was able to recruit some student volunteers. My project assistant, Brandon Hearty, was super-conscientious and did a great job of buying supplies and managing spreadsheets, plus handling logistics, including setting up and taking down each workshop and assisting in exhibition installation and take-down. I also mentored an undergraduate student, Jacob Huffman, in curatorial skills, writing and exhibition management. His involvement was invaluable and I’ve now hired him for support on other projects. Some of this fell into place late in the day: in future I’d integrate more supports from the outset.

I’m curious about the project’s reception. What feedback did participants and viewers give?

Early on, everything felt right about the project and its multi-layered approach. This may sound either self-serving or over-confident, but artists are often their own harshest critics, so the takeaway here is to trust your gut instincts.

Novel in the process was a people’s choice jury component – gallery-goers visiting the prototypes at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery could vote for the project they thought should win the $50,000 award. Results weren’t shared until after each artist had made formal presentations to the public art jury. Hearing that both the jury and people’s choice award selected my project was incredibly affirming.

Workshop participants were not always open to sharing what they felt about the process, but of the more than 200 people that attended a workshop, only two or three left before the end. And almost everyone was willing to have their art displayed publicly in one or more exhibitions. Even more revealing, 99 per cent of participants donated their art to the research project. The vast majority of participants were strangers, yet almost all were open to sharing personal perspectives on their own mental health for others to see.

The public art on billboards and in Calgary’s transit system garnered lots of interest and positive feedback. Several media outlets reported on the project, with one journalist contacting me for an interview after seeing it on a train. But I experienced the harsher side of risk-taking after receiving a complaint about stigmatizing people, regarding an anonymous participant’s art referencing “mental health” in association with “bad neighbourhoods.”

The biggest achievement for me personally, was winning the 2020 Mayor’s Award for Healing Through the Arts, which is generously funded by ATB Financial. But more important is that some workshop participants came back more than once, others took materials home to continue their art making, and all had their visions for mental wellness shared publicly. Artworks were circulated for weeks in highly prominent public venues, on view for thousands of people. Mental illness can be lonely, so a public vision for mental wellness is meaningful.

In terms of ongoing outcomes, one attendee from my second workshop kept in touch and has gone on to become both a colleague and friend. Kaj Korvela is the executive director of the Organization for Bipolar Affective Disorders and I am now the artistic director for its creative arm, SITEcPROJECTS. 

We ran a series of workshops last year, held a major exhibition earlier this year at the cSPACE Arts Hub in Calgary, and curated a Calgary Transit bus. More recently, we co-produced an Alberta-wide, open-call juried exhibition, Perspectives From Within. Dozens of people submitted proposals, and the nine artists in the show have expressed feelings akin to recognition, validation and collective reassurance: one project has evolved naturally into the next. 

In the video the City of Calgary produced about the project, you mention that you were diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome in 2006. I wonder if you could talk about how your personal experiences affected your approach to the project.

From early childhood, when I was less than 10, growing up in Cold War England, I experienced what I thought were spasms, had problems with impulse control, and subsequently started to endure chronic anxiety, and later depression and repetitive and intrusive suicidal ideation. Fortunately, I saw a documentary when I was about 19 or 20, that focused on suicide through the eyes of family members and friends that were left behind. It was a heart-rending account, and I made a promise to myself then that I would never take my own life.

Following art school and my immigration to Canada, I was struggling to keep my art practice alive. I took time to attend an art conference on Vancouver Island, where one of the speakers was Hugh Mackenzie. His stimulating presentation, compelling self-portraits and openness about being hospitalized with acute mental health challenges came as a clarion call for me. As a young parent, having taken strength from Hugh’s art and moving oration, I sought professional help and was diagnosed as clinically depressed.

A few years later, and after cognitive behaviour therapy, I thought I was in better shape and signed up for a research study. It was for people that had responded positively to treatment for depression and were no longer on medication. But after the pre-screening, I was told I was not eligible for the study as I was too depressed!

After years of counselling, and then becoming a teacher at university and art schools, I realized I was seeing a high incidence of mental health challenges amongst the students I taught. I set up a research study that used art as a data-gathering tool to investigate Tourette’s and related conditions, and how they factor into choice of work and career success. That was over 10 years ago: when you take all this into account, it just seemed right when this opportunity presented itself to make new work that addressed what is, quite frankly, a mental illness epidemic.

You have written catalogue essays and art criticism, and have contributed occasionally to Galleries West. Do you have plans to write about the project, or the broader issue of art and mental wellness? Are you are sharing what you have learned in other ways?

In the immediate future, I’ll be working for SITEcPROJECTS and the Organization for Bipolar Affective Disorders to see if we can bring Perpectives From Within to Calgary in 2021. I wrote the curatorial text for this exhibition and would like to expand it further. I enjoy writing, but like most artists I don’t have the security of a permanent full-time paid job, so it’s a case of finding the right time, place and venue to pitch an article. 

I also engage with other folks by giving conference papers and talks at galleries and to students. For instance, I’ll be speaking with students who are part of a mental health residency at the Alberta University of the Arts. I’m also a founding board member for the recently established Tourette OCD Alberta Network. 

This coming winter, I’m curating an exhibition, Moving Targets: War, Film and Video Art, for the University of Calgary’s Founders’ Gallery at the Military Museums. The show includes several mental health-related works including Matilda Aslizadeh’s Hero of Our Time, which confronts the reality of child soldiers, and Mike Vernon’s documentary Deployed, which has some candid first-person interviews from front-line soldiers. And, in 2021, it looks like I’ll be co-curating an exhibition on health and the military, for which I expect there will be a social practice component related to mental health. 

So, yes, I’m continuing to share what I’ve learned across several fronts, or at least as many as I can manage.

Social practice is generally predicated on groups of people gathering to talk and work collectively. That’s hard to do during a pandemic. What are your thoughts about how social practice can adapt to this new reality? Social engagement seems more urgent and necessary than ever, yet also more challenging. Is the answer going virtual, or does that negate too much the social dimensions of this approach?

Social practice already has the challenge that it’s process-based and revolves around people coming together: as the Tate definition implies, process is often as important as outcome. Put another way, process is content. But trying to convey this isn’t easy: photographs of groups of people undertaking some artistic or community activity rarely translate well.

In terms of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s true that collaboration is hard to replicate virtually. I certainly don’t have an immediate antidote for this, although I do see scope for social practice. With people clamouring to get out and about, or connect with others, and social practice lending itself to ways of being that confront what art may be, or challenge what art may seem to be, I see opportunity. 

For example, pre-COVID, Jeanne van Heeswijk was successful in helping create Homebaked, a community-centred cooperative bakery in Liverpool. The pandemic has seen a rise in baking, but mostly in the isolation of one’s home. Still, if social distancing can be maintained, I foresee selective social practice initiatives being totally viable. For instance, hand-written cards or letters, a touching phone call or hand-delivered homemade gifts are much more creative, and more socially loaded, than solely virtual or online connectivity. Approaches such as these, in my mind, framed as art within appropriate communities, lend themselves to art as social practice. Any takers? ■ 

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.