Client

Overview

Collaborative Quilt with Mayo Clinic, AARP and Alzheimer’s Association Conference – Paths to Emotional Wellness
As part of my participation in the Mayo Clinic 2023 Conference on Brain Health and Dementia – Paths to Emotional Wellness with Mayo Clinic, AARP and the Alzheimer’s Association Minnesota-North Dakota, I was asked to be a plenary speaker and facilitate an engagement workshop during the duration of the conference. Together with conference participants, we created an interactive Well-Being Quilt artwork, which was commissioned especially for the conference. This special conference provided attendees the opportunity to explore emotional wellness for oneself and the knowledge to positively impact wellness for those living with dementia, care partners, healthcare professionals, artists, advocates, and researchers who are all dedicated to this topic. The Well-Being Quilt artwork was a collaborative socially engaged work co-created and embodying the ideas as well as the ethos of the conference.

Goals

The overall goal was to utilize creativity and art making as a throughline throughout the conference, to set an engaged, accessible and collaborative tone and intertwine creativity into the conference.
Another goal was to create a collaborative artwork that epitomized both the ideas of the conference and facilitate creative conversations, making, and engaging with participants. Life is hard, often filled with pain and suffering. The power of healing comes from human connection and finding pathways to purpose. Creativity can help provide a pathway forward both through creating and experiencing creativity. Making art is a vital way to communicate between humans.

A goal was to create opportunities for conference attendees to utilize art for community building and emotional exchange and personal and professional reflections.
Provide space for attendees to contemplate, understand, and reflect on the ideas about people living with memory loss and dementia in a creative way.
To consider the many ways to embrace purpose in even small ways in our lives, and consider that creative approaches can provide a fresh look.
To create a collaborative quilt that highlights creativity as a vehicle for well-being.

Process

Inspired by my recent exhibition “The Nexus of Well-Being and Art” at Rochester Art Center, organizers invited me to participate in the conference. Discussions with the organizing committee planned out details of the interactive project. These intimate and engaging conversations produce a remarkable idea of a conference participatory throughline of engagement. This intention manifested in my speaking at the opening and closing as a plenary speaker and the workshop ran the duration of the conference.


The making begins in the studio, where I create a Tyvek painting. It was then cut into 1000, six by six inch squares by studio assistant Chris Delisle and grommeted in four corners by studio assistant Gabe Ramirez.

Attendees choose from the hand-painted colored squares to draw and/or write with provided sharpies. A volunteer team wore aprons as mobile art units and connected the squares with zip ties. The evolving Well-Being Quilt was displayed for conference attendees to experience throughout the day. Lively and poignant conversations took place during the artmaking sessions and I reported those back to the conference when the final artwork was presented as part of my closing speech.

The quilt is currently at Alzheimer's Association Minnesota-North Dakota headquarters.

Additional Information

I believe that art can be utilized for community building and emotional exchange. Making art is a vital way to communicate between humans. This experiential intervention provided opportunities for creative exchange. Using a prompt of: What does well-being mean to you? participants were asked to create an art square; it could have been a simple word, thought, drawing, or doodle. No artistic skill was needed. My special touch was part of each artist-made painted Tyvek square, so each is an individual artwork. The majority of conference participants participated in the quilt. Approximately 500 were created and combined to make the quilt using grommets, zip ties and the painted Tyvek squares. Each square was unique but woven together representing a community expression of well-being. Art making spaces were set up throughout the conference. Participants could stop by for three minutes or thirty minutes in the morning, during lunch or between break out sessions. The result was a stunning, collaboratively created Well-Being Quilt that represented the ideas of the conference and the participants' creative endeavors. As part of my generative practice, the quilt is currently touring to propagate ideas of wellbeing within conversations around people living with memory loss and dementia.