Artful healing — Council works to make care more pleasant

Weekdays, Kyle Spencer teaches drama at Sego Lily School. On weekends, he uses his drama skills with youths in an adolescent treatment center, where they can "act out" in a literal sense and process much of what's going on in their lives.

Members of the Murray Memory Builders Club get together to socialize and support each other and build scrapbooks with people who have dementia. The books may or may not reflect what actually happened. It's part of a project started by the Utah Alzheimer's Association, and the whole goal, replicated in different ways across the state, is to engage people with the memory-stealing disease and their loved ones in personal interaction. The act of putting together a memory book or scrapbook is a tool.

Donna Sine recently made a quilt for a little girl with a chronic medical condition, using old T-shirts the child's mother had collected for the "Turning 20" pink masterpiece.

And when Spencer Lloyd brings over his guitar or watches an old Elvis movie with Vivian Buchanan, it's like breathing sunlight into her home.

They're all among the examples Shannon McQuade uses when she talks about the importance of art in caregiver and healing situations.

They are part of the Arts in Caring Council, a recently formed not-for-profit group "dedicated to transforming the health-care experience through art," says McQuade, project and training coordinator.

Board members of the council are artists and health-care professionals and others. The goal is to facilitate collaboration between those who provide care and artists, such as the visual artist who helps frail homebound people paint or the University of Utah Museum of Fine Arts, which sponsors museum visits for people with dementia.

Many of the participants were doing their artful best for those in health-care settings before the council formed. The council hopes to enhance those efforts and foster collaboration, while encouraging others who aren't incorporating the arts into their healing processes to do so, McQuade says.

On May 16, they're bringing Dr. Patch Adams (remember the Robin Williams movie?) to Kingsbury Hall. Adams believes that putting laughter and joy into the healing process is crucial, part of the same concept. For tickets to "Living a Life of Joy," call 801-581-7100 or go online at kingtix.com.