Boston Creative Aging Program Highlights

Earlier this year, Mayor Martin J. Walsh along with the Age Strong Commission and the Office of Arts and Culture announced a partnership with Goddard House Community Initiatives and Lifetime Arts that has brought free participatory arts programming to older adults in the city’s Jamaica Plain, Mattapan and South End neighborhoods.

The Creative Aging Program (CAP) has expanded creative arts education for older adults, broadened awareness of teaching artists, and demonstrated the benefits and efficacy of integrating arts into older adult education.

Boston Creative Aging Program Teaching Artists

This initiative featured three workshop series, all of which focused on visual art forms. Two of the three workshops were held at branches of the Boston Public Library, and the other was hosted by Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, (IBA Boston), a nonprofit based in the South End which offers affordable housing and supportive programming to improve the knowledge, life skills and health of participants of all ages.

Creating Painted Memories: Oil Painting Workshop, Jamaica Plain Branch of the Boston Public Library

Teaching artist, Deb Putnam, designed this oil painting workshop to build composition skills and to teach participants how to work comfortably with the requisite tools and materials.

The end goal was for participants to learn to create an oil painting based on a significant photograph from their collection — each student completed several!

Every week for eight weeks Deb used short stories about artists like Edward Hopper, Vincent Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Alma Woodsey Thomas to introduce techniques like color mixing and paint surface and quality, and concepts such as perseverance and when to know when your painting is “done.”

Each participant was thrilled to talk about their work, the experience of being in the class, and praised Deb’s teaching. Furthermore, many who participated in this workshop arrived at the exhibit after having performed earlier in the day with the JP Jubilee, an Elders’ Chorus. They went from one joyful creative expression to another, and did so among friends, old and new. (Fun fact: The JP Jubilee, directed by Liz Anker, originated during an earlier round of Creative Aging programming that Lifetime Arts oversaw in 2012-2013 which was funded by the MetLife Foundation.)

Ceramics Workshop at Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion, South End

The following day, Silvina Ibanez’s Air-Dry Ceramics workshop at IBA held its culminating event, an exhibit during which guests delighted in viewing the work that participants built using three ceramics techniques: pinch pottery, slab building and coiling.

As there was a risk that air-dried pieces would be delicate, Silvina encouraged the artists to keep the pieces substantial to avoid breakage. The participants created well over one hundred finished pieces, ranging from objects that were inspired by nature to items that were more utilitarian.

Here is a video of Silvina’s short talk (which she delivered in both English and Español) during the exhibition.

Jewelry Making Workshop at Mattapan Branch of the Boston Public Library

On Thursday, December 5, the final culminating event, a showcase spotlighting jewelry made by workshop participants at the Mattapan branch of the Boston Public Library, featured tables brimming with work created using three different techniques: beading, woven fibers, and multimedia collage.

The goal of the workshop was to introduce and master professional jewelry-making techniques, to learn the tools and materials of the craft, and to develop a body of work that exhibited a cumulative set of art-making skills.

Marjorie Saintil-Belizaire, a City of Boston artist-in-residence, led the workshop and organized the culminating event along with the team from Age Strong, Boston’s commission for older adult affairs, and BPL librarian, Maurice Gordon.

Marjorie ensured that the group of participants, many of whom did not know each other beforehand, and who hailed from several Boston neighborhoods, enjoyed a supportive social environment as they learned together. In fact, she exclaimed that they all bonded so tightly, that they knew everything about each other’s lives and that she felt that she had acquired several new “sisters and aunties” in the process.

Several participants explained to Lifetime Arts that they had family members who are visual and performing artists, and that before this class, they didn’t think that they themselves had the capacity to create art. They, as many first-time Creative Aging workshop participants have done, realized that this is an incorrect assumption!

Photo credit: Shannon McDonough for Lifetime Arts