Art and Connection

So it’s wiggly and imprecise. What a painting means to you will be different than what a painting means to me. I may see an out of focus but colorful and attractive group of sunflowers that would work well against the blue of my bathroom walls, and you may see a direct reference to Vincent Van Gogh. And we can both be right.

Thanks to a partnership with Carnegie Hall, we’ve spent the last five years writing “lullabies” with women and girls in challenging circumstances who are expectant or new mothers. The idea is to reach out and connect with someone in a scary and stressful time, a time when more than one life is in the balance, and work on the non-medical psycho-social aspects of her well being, things like stress, anxiety, depression, or isolation, that have effects on her physical and emotional health.

How do we do it? We spend time together. Our clinicians listen. They provide a safe space to share and ask questions about hopes and dreams and fears, they give prompts for our clients to write letters like: “Imagine your child is 18 years old, and finds this letter, what do you hope for them to be, what do you hope they will think of you?”

All these ideas are discussed, and the words are distilled into song lyrics, and then a song is written, performed, and recorded, and that song becomes a durable, shareable expression of the mothers’ intentions.

It is beautiful and profound.

I’ll never forget one of our artists telling me about writing a lullaby in Travis County Jail. When you meet with the inmates, you have to have a third party in the room, which is cold, stark, and secure. Our artist sat down for the first time with a woman who had just been arrested, had recently lost a child in childbirth, but had a small daughter for whom she wanted to write the song. Our artist told me it was awkward. He was there to have a conversation about personal matters with someone who was hurting on multiple levels, and they appeared to have little in common.

And then the guitar came out. When he took his guitar out of the case, and explained the process, everything changed because no longer was she in a position to be judged, or “fixed.” She was in a space that was safe because it was creative. It was a space for her to collaborate with another person to make something personally relevant and expressive, and the words, and ideas, and tears started to flow.

We have this experience in music all the time. We have refugee children in classes together none of whom speak the same language as one another, but they can make music. You and I might not speak Spanish, but we can enjoy a flamenco show. A student may not be comfortable or competitive on the basketball court, but most certainly can find a meaningful voice, and a place alongside others, playing music, or painting, or writing.

And so in that sense, it is precisely the weakness of art—its lack of precise referential meaning—that is its superpower.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash