Impatience with Things as They Are: Art faces a developmental challenge

(This story appeared in High Performance #62, Summer 1993.)

Chicago video makers Barbara Gregornik, Bob Smith and Ukita Howze from Little City Foundation's Project Vital. Photograph by Robt. C.V. Lieberman.

"Snakepit."

That's what Robert F. Kennedy once called Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. On March 11, 1993, Federal Judge John R. Bartels signed the final legal papers in an 18-year court battle that requires the State of New York to permanently provide community homes for the people who once lived in that snakepit. Willowbrook was closed in 1972 due to courageous action by parents and doctors. Since then more than 100 hearings were held, producing some 50 orders and opinions, which, according to the NY Times, "prodded a sometimes balky state to follow through on the promise of community-based care for the mentally retarded."

The former residents of Willowbrook were in court that day to witness their triumph. Once abused and locked away, today they are citizens with the rights and privileges we all enjoy; they live in houses and apartments now, not warehouses bare of furniture and caked with human waste. With the help of family and professionals, they work and travel and share their lives freely with the people they love, but some of them can remember when they were chained naked to bare pipes, or tied in fetal positions to carts and cribs, forgotten and neglected. Now they are valued members of society; only 22 years ago they were the refuse of humanity, left to live and die alone and out of sight, out of mind.

Willowbrook is the emblem of one of the greatest changes in American consciousness of this century. All across the country the doors of institutions were opened and we began to welcome people with mental retardation to the human race, to help them live with dignity and respect, as independently as possible. In 1965 there were 26,000 people with mental retardation in New York State living in institutions and very few living in homes in the community. Today fewer than 5,000 remain in residential institutions and 26,000 live in 4,746 community residences with supported living arrangements. Similar statistics prevail across the country. Of course many still don't receive the help they need, but change is in motion.

"Since 1950, society's view of persons with developmental disabilities has quietly changed from seeing such persons as nonpersons, who could be expected to exist only in large groups of so-called nonpersons, to seeing them as valued, individual human beings, with the same weaknesses and strengths as the rest of us," said Robert Perske in his book New Life in the Neighborhood.

If people with mental retardation are to be valued as human beings, with the same weaknesses and strengths as the rest of us, then it follows that among them we will find artists, artists who deserve the opportunity to emerge and grow.

Mental retardation is a condition resulting from an interference with mental development before, during or after birth. Whether the causes are physical or social, with proper education, training and understanding, people with retardation can become productive and self-supporting members of society.

People with mental retardation and other developmental challenges such as epilepsy, Down's Syndrome, autism and cerebral palsy have been the most marginalized of citizens, often viewed as monsters. This has been the last prejudice to come under scrutiny, and it cuts across race, creed, class and sexual orientation.

Current progressive thinking in the field boils down to the principle of normalization, that is, making available to people with developmental challenges conditions of everyday living that are as close as possible to the regular circumstances and ways of life in society. This change is reflected in the language we use.

People First, a self-advocacy movement, insists that people with mental retardation are not "the mentally retarded," for that nomenclature divides them from the rest of humanity by placing their identity in their disability. They are people first, and, in the most radical terms, people with "challenges" rather than people with disabilities. To have a disability is to be un-able. To have a challenge is to have a capacity for growth, change and advancement like everybody else.*

We are talking here about an altered view of humanity, human nature in the full spectrum of its possibilities. For the average person, this alteration means facing fears of Otherness, opening doors to interaction, giving and receiving help and attention, and generally relaxing the protective muscles that keep us from feeling comfortable with diversity. For the exceptional person it means advocating for change in the way society as a whole deals with difference. Bottom line, it means really seeing and really knowing others.

Art is one of the most important tools we have in this task, for, unlike IQ and psychological tests, art is a very direct way of discovering who and what humans are, what makes us different and what makes us the same.

All across the U.S., from residential institutions to day activity centers, from Very Special Arts to Project VITAL, there are arts programs for people with mental retardation that are opening doors, providing inspiration and insight and giving artists the opportunity to emerge and participate in the culture. It is fascinating to see these programs in operation and to meet some of the artists working there.

Elias Katz and the late Florence Ludins-Katz were among the first proponents of quality arts programs for people with developmental challenges. "When the opportunity exists," the Katzes have written, "we have seen the creative impulse burst forth like a surge of flood water when the dam had been removed. We have seen people cry when viewing their own work. We have seen the joy in their faces. We have seen the supreme effort made by their bodies to respond to their creative needs. We have seen 'great' artists beg for paintings made by our students to hang in their own studios for inspiration."

Elias and Florence Katz, psychologist and artist respectively, were the founders of the National Institute of Art and Disabilities in Richmond, California, and three other day-activity centers where a prodigious amount of art activity is carried on with the guidance of professional artists. The goal of these programs is not art therapy, which is used primarily to aid in diagnosis and treatment of people who are ill. These are not clinical settings, but art centers with studios and galleries. The artwork of those who come to study and work at these centers is exhibited there side-by-side with the work of successful artists from the national art community. (When I visited NIAD in Richmond, I saw a fabric-art exhibition that included the work of Faith Ringgold.)

Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, founded by the Katzes in 1974 as a part-time program with six students, now has 120 adults enrolled in its daily studio programs. The students take field trips to museums and galleries and lecture-demonstrations. They take the center's classes in basic drawing, painting, clay sculpture, fiber art, graphic arts, silk painting, rug making, wood sculpture and printmaking. Classes in independent living and movement are also available. Its gallery was the first in the country to focus on the art of people with developmental challenges. The center recently conducted a national symposium on the subject, "Altered States — Altered Worlds." The 25-person staff, mostly artists, includes teachers and interns from nearby schools and colleges, plus artists in residence from the California Arts Council.

"Few, if any of the artists/clients at Creative Growth, left to his or her own devices, would produce art of the same quality as they do with the support of the organization," says current director Irene Ward-Brydon.

It was at Creative Growth that I encountered one of the most successful artists I have ever met — successful because his intriguing work is now written about, shown and bought around the world, but also because he surmounted the enormous burden of a lifetime of institutionalization to begin living independently and making art at the age of 72: Dwight Mackintosh.

An examination of Mackintosh as an artist and his experience at Creative Growth brings to the foreground many interesting questions about the function of art in this setting.

Mackintosh came to Creative Growth with his brother in 1978 looking for a day activity program. He had recently been released, after 56 years of living in institutions, from a state hospital where he had shown some interest in drawing. The minute he entered the studio he sat down at a table, chose a black felt-tip pen and began to draw rapidly and with concentration. He filled the top of the page with a looping, unreadable script as if he were telling a story, crossing out sections here and there as if they were mistakes. Below the script he drew three male characters with erect penises, using an almost continuous line.

These characters dominated Mackintosh's early work. He rarely talked about it, but when he did he referred to them as "the boys," perhaps himself and his fellow institutional inmates as adolescents. Subject matter expanded to include buildings, cars, buses, musical instruments and animals. Now 87, Mackintosh is incredibly prolific. Since 1978, 1400 of these drawings have been preserved (early work was lost in a fire). While he has tried a number of other materials, he continues to be interested mainly in line and marking pens. He puts his finished works aside and does not refer to them again, never taking them home. His work began to sell immediately, but Mackintosh has shown no real interest in that either, though he is aware that he is an artist and a celebrity.

Observers are fascinated with many things about Mackintosh's work: the acuity with which he creates his images, their obviously erotic orientation, the array of damaged machinery, the alluring text fragments ("Alexander von Humboldt," "Eritraine [sic] Rebellion," "sailing home to Kansas," "sweet temptaitans" [sic]), his indifference to the finished work.

Mackintosh's art is the subject of a catalog published by Creative Growth, "Dwight Mackintosh: The Boy Who Time Forgot." It contains a stimulating essay by John MacGregor, an art historian interested in psychoanalysis and art who authored "The Discovery of the Art of the Insane."

MacGregor believes that Mackintosh is doing what artists do: relating, in the only way he can, his deepest feelings about himself, his history and his world. But MacGregor sees Mackintosh's relationship to his work as the element that distinguishes him from other artists. Probing through the process and imagery of the work, MacGregor delves into the nature of art-making by an artist who apparently has no intellectual perception of what he is doing, is "totally unaware of the symbols he employs," and "draws only for himself." Unlike the vast majority of people with mental retardation, Mackintosh's condition is determined to be "severe." He is regarded by many as having the intellectual age of eight and appears unable to "grow" any older.

"However," says MacGregor, "the mentally retarded adult is never a child… Mackintosh's drawings are not those of an old man or of a child. They are the drawings of a master draftsman. Watching him draw, all day, everyday, one is invariably astonished by the utter certainty with which he proceeds, by the absolute authority and conviction of his line, and by the undeniable authenticity of the resultant images. Pen in hand, he is unmistakably an artist."

The function of the teacher in this setting can be problematic. The classes at Creative Growth are, says Ward-Brydon, "closer to tutorials where a relationship is formed with a mentor. It takes a great deal of confidence and sensitivity on the part of the teachers and other staff to practice 'hands off' and not overwhelm people with fragile egos and little self-esteem. It is hard to know when to push and when to hold back." Attempts by his teachers to get Mackintosh to stop writing on his drawings or to exhibit a "developing understanding of pictorial space, light and shadow" proved frustrating to them.

"Had this 'art school' mentality been imposed successfully on Mackintosh, his work would have been permanently undermined and his significance as an artist obliterated," claims MacGregor. "If we can avoid exposing [artists with mental retardation] to contamination from 'art' as it is conventionally understood, we are permitted to obtain a glimpse of radically different experiences of reality, of new languages of form and innovative means of expression...It is presumptuous to attempt to teach them art. In the act of making a mark, there is no right or wrong."

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this study is the degree to which it reveals a person with mental retardation as a unique individual. "It is long past time," MacGregor says "that we stop generalizing about 'the mentally retarded'…Watching Mackintosh exhibit his mastery, we are reminded," he says, "that there are forms of intelligence and of functioning not measured by conventional methods of assessing intelligence… Mentally retarded people differ from one another more, not less than intellectually more sophisticated individuals do. It is a serious misconception to see them as lacking in individuality or identity."

Mackintosh's work has changed over the years and he is now viewed as working in an authentic "late style," a change MacGregor compares to that of Picasso, in which an artist is discovered "helplessly in the grip of an overwhelmingly powerful natural process," creating serial imagery with increasing spontaneity, freedom, speed and assurance. MacGregor sees in this progression proof of the value of an enlightened art program for Mackintosh. Creative Growth provided "the opportunity of regular and serious involvement with image-making," which engendered development and "a chance to evolve along a path." He stresses that for individuals who manifest an unusual affinity with image-making, art involvement must not be seen as recreational activity, but "as an opportunity for the kind of intense commitment which truly fosters creative growth.

"It is," he concludes, "in such a situation of deep involvement, freedom and respect that, on very rare occasions, an artist of singular talent will emerge; and the all but unknown reality of a hidden and silent portion of our society will find expression, and a voice that can be heard."

Another important voice has been heard as the result of the adult arts program at the Exceptional Children's Foundation in Los Angeles. Tammy Brackens' series, "Toilet Baby" (1988-89) is an eloquent exploration of human individuation and the pain embedded in separation from the mother. Brackens, 27, lives with her parents in a South Central neighborhood and has been attending the day activity program at ECF every day since 1985. The "Toilet Baby" series has been bought by ECF and hangs in the studio workshop, which also contains a printing press, a puppet theater, silk screens, looms, a darkroom and kilns. The day I visited ECF, Brackens was sitting at her work station intently studying her work on the wall, and only took a moment to shake my hand.

In "Toilet Baby," it is clear from the first that the child's image is trapped, first inside the mother's image, which is symbolized by a duck, and then trapped in the toilet. The other works explore the child's aging and growing process, her attempts to communicate (symbol: a telephone) and her eventual emergence from the bathroom fixtures that entrap her. The individuation is not achieved without some injury to the duck/mother, but in the end, both exist as separate creatures in a loving embrace enjoying a bath that is now nothing more than a bath. Interestingly enough, the child also evolves from white to black. Like Dwight Mackintosh, Tammy Brackens does not analyze, and may be unaware of, the symbols operating in her work.

Wilma James started the program 26 years ago as a means for people with developmental challenges to gain a skill that offered them a real place in the world. ECF Art Director Dianne Malley, herself a successful Los Angeles artist, honors James' effort. "Imagine the resistance," she says, "to a program like this for minority people, developmentally disabled and poor, that tried to train people to create things that were popular and sellable." Milton Davis, with ECF from its inception, makes black-and-white drawings that sell now for as much as $500 and are often reproduced in the contexts of African American pride and history.

Malley works hard to exhibit and sell the work of the artists who have emerged at ECF. She has mounted exhibitions at the California Afro-American Museum and a wide variety of venues around L.A. and the U.S. She sees an enormous personal benefit to the artists when they are professionally recognized.

"That," says Malley, "is the only way artists, the art world and the artists' families can take it seriously. You have to confront the fact that these are serious artists."

Malley is deeply committed to showing these artists both individually and as a group in a variety of contexts. Aware of the debate around the dangers of disempowering them as artists by "labeling" them as disabled, she shares John MacGregor's opinion that the artists, when seen as coming from a specific cultural group, have a great deal to teach us about that culture. "When I go to conventions, that's all they want to argue about," says Malley. "I feel, as an administrator of an art center for developmentally disabled people, it's our mandate to discuss it from that angle."

Groundbreaking work is being conducted in the performing and media arts as well. Famous People Players in Toronto makes life-size puppets of famous people come alive on stage. The Creative Center in Visalia, California, boasts accomplished artists like dancer David Looper, as well as its own mime troupe. The Theatre Group for the Mentally Handicapped in Washington, DC, deals with issues like deinstitutionalization and cultural integration.

Much of this work goes beyond creative opportunity into advocacy for the rights and well-being of people with challenges, and, in addition, it impacts art theory.

Project VITAL at Little City Foundation is a training curriculum that has taught 100 people with developmental challenges in the Chicago area to operate equipment at public-access television studios, and the curriculum is being used in 14 other locations in seven states. The award-winning project has produced 80 videos by VITAL graduates and a magazine show, "Given Opportunities," distributed to 220 cable stations nationwide. (For details, see High Performance #60, pp. 56-57.)

Project VITAL's creator, Little City Foundation Executive Director Alan Dachman, feels that broadcast of this work goes a long way toward destroying stereotypes of people with developmental challenges, and shows what they can do when given the opportunity. Dachman is a rabid advocate for change, and is highly motivated to see that people with developmental challenges have the opportunity to participate in mainstream culture. His vision is grand: "To exclude the point of view of any individual based on a misperception of his/her ability to function 'normally' skews our basic concept of human reality. Inclusion is not charity, but an essential philosophy that only makes life richer and more meaningful for all."

From the point of view of art history and criticism Project VITAL has demonstrated some of the most important theories currently being written about in academic and professional circles. Ever since scholars began to grasp the staggering importance of electronic and broadcast media to human consciousness, this subject has captured the attention of those working in the arts, and the vigor of the debate has literally changed the way we view the nature of art making and art consumption. Now both art and media are viewed as the deliberate manipulation of imagery, profoundly affecting the evolution of the human psyche. Much contemporary art is about media, and the critical theory surrounding it even discusses art and media in the realm of human rights: Who has control over the means of media production and representation? Who is creating the imagery that represents our lives? Under what conditions is it created and disseminated?

Not only does Project VITAL use imagery, content and technology to allow us access to the thoughts and feelings of people with challenges, through training in cable access it puts the control of production into the hands of these people. Because of LCF's diligent distribution system, ample evidence of that control is demonstrated every time a community cable station broadcasts a video by a VITAL graduate. VITAL did something practical with art theory, and presented it for millions to see. Viewed through this lens, the media truly belong to all people. In some important and far-reaching ways, Project VITAL can be said to have changed the world.

The benefits of this work are many, and they are significant — to all participants. The most progressive of those who work and live with people with developmental challenges will tell you that their lives are fuller and more interesting every day, not only because they are participating in the joys of challenge and enormous achievement, but because their own perception of life has changed. Robert Perske notes: "The more advanced a civilization becomes, the more it will understand, value and relate healthily to its members who have severe handicapping conditions. It is the proper balancing of our competitions and our cooperations that enables civilization to take an evolutionary leap forward. The discoveries and skills learned in neighborhood settings, from mutually healthy relationships with people who have handicaps, will lead us to find a valuable new principle."

When it comes to the role of art in all this, no one has said it better than William Bronston, one of the heroic doctors who brought the Willowbrook abuses to light. He now directs a radical educational initiative, Project Interdependence. The impact of his words deepens when we add to it the picture of Dwight Mackintosh, pen in hand, struggling with "the boys."

"The arts are the record of our impatience with things as they are. Each art form is a telegram expressing and urging more human attention to experience. The arts point the way and map our ideals through imagination."

Linda Frye Burnham is a co-director of Art in the Public Interest.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #62, Summer 1993.

*The term "people with challenges" has been challenged, primarily by people with physical challenges, some of whom prefer to highlight their "handicaps." The Disability Rag recently stated: "We suspect it has caught on precisely because it is more 'positive' — by 'positive,' we mean it gives society a way to forget about the bad stuff of disability. And by that we mean discrimination. 'Physically challenged' attempts to conceal a crucial fact: that the reason we can't do lots of things is not because we're lazy or because we won't accept a 'challenge,' but because many things are simply beyond our control — like barriers." Advocate Alan Dachman responds: "They identify with their disability instead of their humanity. Their true challenge is in getting the rest of the community to listen." return

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999