2015 Articles

Art at the Living Museum

Lascano, Danny

A visit to the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center’s Living Museum, a gallery that showcases art made by past and current patients of the institution, demonstrates the therapeutic functions art can serve. Art can be a method of coping with and processing events of the past, a scaffold for mending and rebuilding one’s life, a means of economic support, and a form of connection with the outside world. Therefore, therapeutic art can provide a model for adjunctive care for patients suffering from mental illness, one that can add meaning and satisfaction to traditional models of care in long-term care facilities and psychiatric hospitals. The process of reflection on individual works of art and meditation on the relationship between creativity and illness, function as a level of therapy itself for the mentally ill, and provides justification for continued funding and allocation of resources to the arts and humanities.