The locations of wellness programs, such as guided meditations, yoga sessions, sound baths, quiet mornings, and other consciousness-engaging customized experiences, are becoming more and more art galleries and museums. In a pandemic holdover that has proven successful for accessibility, some of these events are also available online in both live-streamed and archived form. Frequently, these events are purposefully situated near specific works of art or exhibition installations that highlight the desired energy of the practice. This new dynamic, which is an understandable marriage of art and deliberate attention, has acquired a lot of popularity in recent years for a variety of reasons, and nearly every institution in the region has implemented some variation of it.
Yoga and other self-care programs have been offered at CAAM for many years. A lifelong yoga instructor and community activist named Marley Rae has been leading free hour-long yoga classes at MOCA for the past few months (the next one is an evening session on February 16). MOCA has also been in this space for years. The class is tuned in to the message of community, resilience, and inclusive dialogue, as well as the high-vibration movement and palette, of the paintings when it is placed in front of the vibrant, expressive, ancestral, spiritual, and justice-oriented murals in the current Judith F. Baca: World Wall exhibition at the MOCA Geffen Little Tokyo location. This brilliant fusion of art and yoga engages with a wider conversation about healing at the nexus of collective, systemic trauma, especially in communities of color, in addition to its focus on physical strength, balance, quiet focus, and peace in the psyche, and the urgency of taking better care of ourselves on an individual level.
If you’re looking for a lighter touch or something you can do from home, the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center have been hosting free half-hour Mindful Awareness Meditation sessions every Thursday at 12:30 p.m., both live at the museum’s Billy Wilder Theater and streamed on their website.
This little weekly dose of solitude may be just what the doctor ordered. According to the website, “mindful awareness meditation is the moment-by-moment practise of actively and honestly examining one’s bodily, mental, and emotional sensations.” In addition to reducing stress, the delight of reclaiming some time for yourself throughout the workplace is quite real, whether it be on the job site with a break for some exhibition viewing, at your desk, or when using a phone in the local park.
Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group exhibition is where LACMA’s next guided art & meditation session will take place on Friday, January 27 at 10am. On March 21, there will be an evening sound bath in that same lofty installation. These initiatives are in addition to the museum’s regular Mindful Mondays 4pm zoom sessions, which will continue on February 13 and March 13. A two-hour reflection and craft-based session guided by a certified art therapist was simply something new the museum tried out just last week. At least for them.
Museotherapy, as this new discipline is known, is exactly what it sounds like: a development of the growing professional understanding of the advantages of art viewing for one’s mental (and physical) health as well as an expansion of established art therapy approaches used with a larger clientele. Nicole Rademacher, an artist and art therapist, led the discussion on mental health and well-being in the museum. Her work focuses on integrating the experience of viewing and later creating art as a prompt and source for a therapeutic experience — seeing things in new ways and using your reaction to art as a springboard for exploring deeper emotions.
“I think it’s critical for our Los Angeles museums to consider further how guided looking and meaningful reflection with the assistance of a mental health expert might aid their visitors,” says Rademacher. Particularly now that we are better aware of how the pandemic and other stressors have impacted mental health.
The only way to find out was to go to therapy, so I did just that. The event was organized in the perfectly appropriate New Abstracts exhibition (which features selected recent acquisitions to the permanent collection with a focus on large-scale non-figurative mixed media painting). According to a statement made in the museum’s text, abstraction “continues to offer abundant possibilities for innovation and insight.” Today’s abstract languages are used by many artists to explore not only the possibilities of color, material, gesture, and form, but also the ability to give abstract art a political, spiritual, or personal meaning. The subsequent process of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and pondering had the perfect setting.
What transpired was unusual and impressive, without my going into too much detail about my own experience or revealing the personal opinions of my fellow guests. Each individual was instructed to choose a piece that spoke to them, then spend around 30 minutes in silence reflecting on it and evaluating our bodily, mental, and emotional reactions. When we immerse ourselves in the job, does it make us feel peaceful or excited, bring back memories, or instill energy in the body or breath? Can we determine what aspects of the work—color, forms, materials—follow the initial appeal and cause these reactions? Each of us was instructed to pay attention to what surfaced and, if we could, determine why. A loosely knit yarn artwork by Channing Hansen that I fell in love with has an intricate pattern of colour, texture, seams, scars, translucence, and shadows that not only behave like a painting by another means but also makes me think of my mother and her loom and needle textile art practise. Following its loops and lines was a beautiful game. I later attempted to draw it from memory during the night’s art-making portion in order to verify my recall of the event. I was successful.
In all honesty, even turning off our phones and devoting a longer period of time to one task—say, 30 minutes as opposed to 90 seconds—was a relief for our busy spirits. I’m used to using language to explore art in a public and historical discourse of explanation that is not — or is at least not solely — emotional or cathartic. I came to the realization that when it comes to art, the critic runs the risk of doing everything through thought; of seeing with the brain, of feeling through thought, of launching right into the professionalized interpretive mode and ignoring the place of wonder and love that first inspired them—set me—on the path of art writing in the first place. The event “reminded them of being a kid again,” as several of the other attendees put it, referring to a pure sensation of discovery. It was a strong reminder of what I — and we all — are doing here, which is searching for something that makes us feel something. This small, safe introduction to the monumental role art can play in that process was a proper eye-opener, and for those of us in the museum that night, it was absolutely good medicine. Of course, any fully realized course of therapy will involve hard work and take time; however, it was a good start.