Art Brings Expression to Alzheimer’s Patients

The classroom is alive with activity and chatter. Women lean forward, intently pasting together fabric, paper and cardboard. Others draw with bright markers. Some sit still, content just to be there.

Florence Skuce, 87, gently claps her hands and inspects the small notebook she has created. “My book,” she squeals. “Hooray.”

Dorothy Ewin, 89, says she may use her notebook to record “little notations of things that are coming up.”

Emma Maryman, 93, does not speak, but grins broadly at her finished product, assembled with a lot of help from workshop leaders.

Within minutes, Dorothy has forgotten where her notebook came from. Others will also soon forget. The workshop, however, has been a success.

It is one of dozens sponsored each month by Arts for the Aging, a nonprofit group in Washington that uses professional artists to bring art into the lives of the elderly, particularly victims of Alzheimer’s disease.

The program sends painters, mimes, harpists, dancers, storytellers and others to adult day-care centers and nursing homes to involve older people in the arts and stimulate their creativity.

One week participants may help make a quilt, another time they will learn pantomime, sometimes they hear stories, often they paint or draw.

The program succeeds where countless other arts and crafts projects “never seem to achieve anything but frustration,” reported Sara Gibson of the Bethesda Fellowship House, an adult day-care center in suburban Maryland. The artists “allow the often unusual creativity seen in Alzheimer’s participants to flourish rather than attempting to stifle it with conformity.”

Melissa Brown, recreation director for Iona House, another center visited by Arts for the Aging, said it gives patients with intellectual problems a new way to express themselves.

“Even the cognitively impaired elderly have the ability to appreciate art. Art can reach the emotional side of them, which can still be functioning and in need of being utilized.”

Artists who conduct the workshops are specially trained to teach the aged and to help even Alzheimer’s patients participate without getting frustrated at tasks that are too difficult.

“We try to bring out whatever is left in people,” said Lolo Sarnoff, a 73-year-old retired scientist and active sculptor who created Arts for the Aging. “You have to be a little bit more patient, a little bit more repetitive, but they will do some very beautiful things.”

Working with the arts has a “soothing effect” on the Alzheimer’s patients and reduces their agitation, even though the classes soon may be forgotten because of memory impairment, Sarnoff said.

“They are incredibly happy when they can accomplish something, but you don’t expect that they will remember. We just live in the moment with them.”

Mark Rooney, a painter and art teacher who is Arts for the Aging’s program director, said many patients learn and progress during workshops, although some may never master drawing even the basic border that is the first step in his classes. “One student makes Jackson Pollock-type scribbling throughout the class period, then holds it up with a sweet smile to ask, ‘Is this what you wanted?’ ”

Rooney is fascinated with the work of eccentrics such as Pollock and Vincent van Gogh and sees Arts for the Aging as an opportunity to study that art in progress. “I personally respond to their art because it is very honest. It’s not contrived in any way.”

An estimated 2.5 million to 3 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of severe intellectual impairment in older people. The numbers are expected to mushroom as the nation’s population ages.

At first, individuals may experience only subtle changes in memory. But as the disease progresses, it can cause serious forgetfulness, confusion, irritability and changes in personality and judgment that leave patients unable to care for themselves.

Bodil Meleney, a sculptor and part-time executive director of Arts for the Aging, said it is one of many support systems that family members need as they struggle with the daily demands of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

“We fit in as a small cog in the whole thing. The artwork seems to calm them down. They are pleased with what they have done.”

Sarnoff started Arts for the Aging “like everything else in my life--by mistake.” She said she happened to answer the telephone at the Art Barn, a community-run art gallery, when the National Institutes of Health called six years ago seeking someone to teach an art class for Alzheimer’s patients.

That pilot program was so well received that she began organizing similar workshops from the Art Barn, and last year she created a separate nonprofit organization “dedicated to enhancing the lives of the aging through art.”

Arts for the Aging, financed entirely by private grants and donations, celebrated its first anniversary with a gala benefit late last year at the West German Embassy that featured an exhibit of artwork by Alzheimer’s patients.