The Wellness Movement That’s Empowering Older Adults to Become Artists

Artsy, an online platform for collecting and discovering art, has as its mission “to make all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.” Recently, Artsy Magazine interviewed Maura O’Malley, Lifetime Arts’ co-founder and CEO, about the way arts learning, skill-building, and social engagement — the tenets of creative aging — are increasing feelings of well-being and health among the adults 55 and older who participate in professionally-led arts workshops being offered across the U.S. in places like public libraries, museums, community centers, and residential communities.

In this interview with reporter Abigail Cain, O’Malley illuminated the following key points:

    • This is a very new field and movement. As recently as the mid-2000s: “There was essentially no infrastructure for developing and delivering arts programming for older adults,”… It was difficult to find trained teaching artists, and even existing programs displayed ageism by assuming “that older adults are not creative or learners…”.
    • Population shifts and societal changes take time to become institutionalized. “O’Malley points to children’s programming in libraries as a prototype for the creative aging movement. ‘Thirty to forty years ago, librarians weren’t particularly interested in having kids running around libraries,’ she said. ‘And now, every library in the United States has storytime many times a week, and there is an enormous amount of professional development and program funding and advocacy around early literacy and public libraries.'”
    • Success for Lifetime Arts (and its peers in the field of creative aging) is independence and sustainability for the organizations we support. “The Brooklyn Public Library’s creative aging program … came about through a collaboration with Lifetime Arts that began in 2011. The program is now independently funded, making it ‘a kind of a model exemplar of the work that we want people to be able to do’ …”

Read, The Wellness Movement that’s Empowering Older Adults to Become Artists by Abigail Cain (June 14, 2018) on Artsy.