Fairs
Explore the Benefits of Community Art Making
Discover the benefits of community art making at Affordable Art Fair NYC Spring with our community project in collaboration with The Art Therapy Project.
Michael DeStefano
Tuesday 12 March, 2024
Get involved at Affordable Art Fair New York Spring with our community installation, “Collective Bloom” in collaboration with The Art Therapy Project. Over the course of the fair, we’re inviting you to share your creative spirit by designing petals that will be added to a wall to create a communal floral display. The installation will be testament to the transformative power of shared creativity. Each petal created represents your individual vision of the bright possibilities your future holds.
We’re excited to work with The Art Therapy Project; a nonprofit providing group art therapy in a safe inclusive space for people in need of mental health services. “Collective Bloom” will create a space that can ignite dialogue and exploration of the personal and collective experience.
What are the benefits?
“There is a growing body of research exploring how the arts contribute to wellbeing at the community level. Recent studies and reports suggest that arts and cultural practices enhance social cohesion, preserve culturally relevant social capital, and contribute to healthy communities, as well as to individual well-being.”
– Pesata et al. (2022) in an article titled: Engaging the Arts for Wellbeing in the United States of America: A Scoping Review.
How can you get involved?
“The field of art therapy has a lot to offer community art-making. Throughout its history, art therapy has utilized the creative process to support the mental well-being of individuals and groups, but within a communal setting, it can broaden this scope of practice to include larger groups of individuals outside of the context of therapy.
By shifting the focus from strictly clinical settings to those with a community focus, art therapists can engage in the promotion of shared connections, as well as supporting social justice and empowerment through the arts. By holding communal spaces for individuals to contribute their experience and knowledge into a collective artistic expression, individual and shared strengths can be acknowledged within a group while becoming a combined expression of one community to another.
As it is said, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the mosaic of imagery that can emerge in community art-making expands this idiom exponentially. Art therapy has always leveraged this profound nature of the art-making process to invite individuals to delve into their inner unconscious and create something that is bigger than the words they can use to express it.
Within the context of community art-making, art therapists have the tools to support this depth of expression and can help facilitate the connection of shared experiences with a much broader group. The Art Therapy Project is thrilled to bring community art-making back to the Affordable Art Fair this Spring, and we invite all of the community to join us in our booth to view and contribute your creativity to our collective art installation.”
– Joshua Brancheau, MPS, ATR-BC, LCAT, LPAT, Clinical Director at The Art Therapy Project
More about “Collective Bloom“
This installation is a testament to the transformative power of shared creativity.
Visualize the blossoming of our community. Throughout the weekend, AAF patrons have been invited to share their creative contributions to this collective bloom. Each petal represents an individual’s vision of the bright possibilities their future holds. Individual petals could be focused on the artist, on a loved one, or on the broader community as a whole. Please enjoy this communal expression organized by The Art Therapy Project, and ask a TATP team member for materials if you would like to add a petal of your own creation.