Creative Aging
Art and Wellness
Creative Aging is a centerpiece of The Phillips Collection’s art and wellness initiatives, reflecting founder Duncan Phillips’s belief in the profound and positive impact that art can have on our well-being. For the past 12 years, during the Creative Aging partnership, The Phillips Collection and Iona Senior Services have brought “joy-giving and life-enhancing” experiences through art to older adults living with memory loss.
The monthly program takes place at the museum and Iona’s two adult day centers, the Wellness & Arts Center in Tenleytown and the Washington Home Center in Congress Heights. In the museum galleries, Phillips educators facilitate conversations through observation and inquiry, encouraging older adults to explore works of art, share ideas, identify feelings, connect with one another, and celebrate the present moment. The participants explore themes such as identity, family, home, food, community, music, and nature. Later at Iona, in the art studio, guided by Phillips and Iona staff, individuals respond to the museum’s artworks and exhibitions using the creative process in visual art, poetry, music, dance, and storytelling, deepening connections to the artwork and each other.
This exhibition celebrates the transformative powers of art and artmaking for older adults living with memory loss. As one participant stated, “Art gathers us up.”
IMAGE: Silk hoops made by Creative Aging participants, inspired by Linling Lu’s Soundwaves
Revealing and Creating Identity
Washington Home Center
After seeing and discussing Susan Rothenberg’s painting Three Masks, Washington Home Center participants explored masks as a means of revealing and creating identity. Relying on imagination more than representation, the artists moved through a design and fabrication process to create individual masks, adding color and details to the papier-mâché base with acrylic paint and found materials. As the masks evolved over four weeks, they took on a life of their own, with layers of color and embellishment, a reflection of joyful creation as well as a recognition of complicated selves.
The artists pose with their masks. The beauty of the masks and their creators inspired these studio portraits, which were designed and photographed by Nephelie Andonyadis.
Community Quilt
Washington Home Center
When Iona opened its Congress Heights location in October 2020, we began planning our first collaborative project: a community quilt celebrating our new home. Starting in June 2021, wearing masks, socially distancing, and cautiously working together in the studio, we embarked on the project. We looked closely at Horace Pippin’s Domino Players, constructing a narrative, and finding connections to our own lives. With a limited palette chosen to reflect Pippin’s, we began to arrange and stitch these scraps of fabric in pleasing ways, talking and often singing as we worked. During the two years that this quilt was evolving, we looked at many other artworks in the Phillips’s galleries that spoke to the theme of home. We honored our families, recalling the time we spent together around the table, playing games, learning to sew, preparing meals, or waiting for someone to come home.
This quilt, a tapestry of our stories, is a record of the family we have built at Iona’s Washington Home Center.
Moving and Singing Creatively
Washington Home Center and Wellness & Arts Center
Frank Stewart’s photographs inspired us in many ways. We connected to Stewart’s themes and artistry through dance, music, poetry, and drawing. In the gallery, we responded to shapes and shadows, moving creatively with Nancy Havlik’s Dance Performance Group and singing favorites with Miles Spicer’s jazz and blues guitar. In the studio, Wellness & Arts Center artists created compositions based on the circular shape in The Bow.
Words from the Heart
Washington Home Center
During our visit to the exhibition Lou Stovall: The Museum Workshop, we explored the DC artist’s connection to music and community activism. Inspired by Stovall’s commitment to social justice, we designed posters that share our Words from the Heart with our communities.
First, we looked carefully at Stovall’s screenprints and explored his use of positive and negative space and relationships of line, color, and shape. We transferred these lessons in effective composition to paper collage. On the collages, with black ink and chopsticks, we added our words of wisdom, expressive marks that became part of the design, like Stovall’s in his poster commissioned for DC’s Roberta Flack Day (Human Kindness Day), April 22, 1972. Guided by Stovall, Iona artists learned how art can be a call to action.
A Sense of Place
Wellness & Arts Center
Wellness & Arts Center artists responded to William Christenberry’s Akron Wall by creating poems and assemblages honoring real and imagined places. Investigating and appreciating the textures and colors of found objects—wood pieces, shells, smooth glass beads, rough cardboard—the artists celebrated the places that had shaped their lives.
Balancing Improvisation and Intention
Wellness & Arts Center
While viewing Ching Ho Cheng’s Untitled (1985) in the exhibition Pour, Tear, Carve: Material Possibilities in the Collection, members of Iona’s Wellness & Arts Center composed a poem, connecting to the empty middle space and the rough edges of the positive shapes. Later at the center, they created torn-paper collages, balancing improvisation with intentional placement of the paper pieces, a process they compared to living their lives.
Painting Music
Washington Home Center and Wellness & Arts Center
Inspired by our experience with Linling Lu’s installation Soundwaves, participants at both centers continued to explore art, music, and emotion. We cultivated a contemplative space in the studios, embracing stillness with the reverberations of a singing bowl. Connecting sound and color and shape, we painted with fabric dye on silk hoops, using a very gentle touch with a sumi brush. We listened to Philip Glass’s Etudes while we painted, matching color and gesture to our emotional responses to the music. The process of freehand silk painting can be delightfully surprising. As the dyes flow across the silk, they blend in ways that are sometimes unexpected. The colors and patterns of these paintings reflect the touch of each hand moving differently to Glass’s music.
Gathering at the “Table of Joy”
Washington Home Center and Wellness & Arts Center
Iona participants enjoyed spending time with Giuseppe De Nittis, imagining narratives and creating personal stories in response. As we stepped into the artworks, we explored our sensory responses. Where would I be in this painting? At the table? On the grass? What would the grass feel like on my bare feet? What would I notice? What would I hear?
After the gallery visits, both centers set the tables in their studios with linens, flowers, and china teacups. Participants gathered together, creating the warmth of community and companionship. One Washington Home Center participant called this experience “a table of joy.” We celebrated the joyful table with a series of still-life exercises, depicting vases, fruits, flowers, vegetables, and linens in our artwork with different materials and methods. We worked with ink and graphite, drawing from observation, and with vibrant watercolor and bleeding-tissue paper, mixing color, transferring color, and finding organic shapes in the transferred prints.
The table where we gathered was a space of hospitality and creativity, a place to explore shapes and colors, experiment with media, develop our drawing skills, and enjoy the simple beauty of an object. Through all of this, we shared stories and impressions of how, when, and why we gather at the table of joy.
In Memory of Isom “Ike” Hunter
Wellness & Arts Center
Ike inspired us with his playful approach to artmaking. He delighted in experimenting with color, texture, and technique, as we see in his layered, mixed-media response to Howard Hodgkin’s Torso. This work, Gate, was created in 2019 with tempera paint and oil pastel on cardboard.
