ARTICLE

How a Revered Studio for Artists with Disabilities Is Surviving at a Distance

By Dan Piepenbring — 2020

Creative Growth is a place for artists with disabilities to gather, work, talk, and think without fear of reproach or dismissal. In 1974, the organization’s founders, Elias Katz and Florence Ludins-Katz, opened the studio in response to the closure, in the sixties, of many of California’s psychiatric hospitals, which caused a spike in the number of homeless and incarcerated people with disabilities. A thriving arts center, the Katzes wrote, would demonstrate that such ostracized people “not only belong in the community but should be active members of the community.”

Read on www.newyorker.com

FindCenter Post-Image

If only our passion to understand others were as great as our passion to be understood. Were this so, all our apologies would be truly meaningful and healing.

1

FindCenter Post-Image

When forgiveness experts talk in binary language (’You either forgive the wrongdoer or you are a prisoner of your own anger and hate’), they are collapsing the messy complexity of human emotions into a simplistic dichotomous equation.

1

FindCenter Post-Image

People’s sense of self-worth is pivotal to their ability to look clearly at the hurt they’ve caused. The more solid one’s sense of self regard, the more likely that that person can feel empathy and compassion for the hurt party, and apologize from an authentic center.

4

FindCenter Post-Image

Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.

4

FindCenter Post-Image

The best apologies are short, and don’t go on to include explanations that run the risk of undoing them. An apology isn’t the only chance you ever get to address the underlying issue. The apology is the chance you get to establish the ground for future communication.

6

FindCenter Post-Image

Anger is inevitable when our lives consist of giving in and going along; when we assume responsibility for other people’s feelings and reactions; when we relinquish our primary responsibility to proceed with our own growth and ensure the quality of our own lives; when we behave as if having a...

3

FindCenter Post-Image

Feeling angry signals a problem, venting anger does not solve it. Venting anger may serve to maintain, and even rigidify, the old rules and patterns in a relationship, thus ensuring that change does not occur.

FindCenter Post-Image

There’s a widespread belief that if you have solid self-esteem you don’t need outside affirmation and praise. This is patently untrue, by the way.

FindCenter Post-Image

We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.

4

FindCenter Post-Image

Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.

7

1
2
Next

EXPLORE TOPIC

Creative Well-Being