How We stART

On Friday May 17th, I had the pleasure of participating as a featured artist in the Wyandot Behavioral Health Network’s third annual stART the Conversation art exhibit.

The exhibition, which coincided with the Downtown KCK Third Friday Art Walk, aims to encourage awareness and conversations about the deep connections between art and mental health—especially art’s role in healing. It highlights diverse perspectives, including those of individuals with lived experience, and features the works of artists who receive services at community behavioral health agencies such as the Wyandot Behavioral Health Network and University Health Behavioral Health, where I work. To share space with these artists and to lend my voice to this most important topic was an honor and a privilege.

My submission, Kintsugi: Fault, speaks of the ways in which we become stronger, more beautiful, and more complex when we persevere and put ourselves back together in in the aftermath of something that shatters and shakes us apart. I created Fault for a hope-themed art exhibit at University Health Behavioral Health in 2018, but its message—particularly in the wake of events in the past five years—remains relevant: Art comes from the part of us that wants to survive and thrive. And, while art can help us to cope with or even make sense of our pathologies, it does not come from the pathologies themselves.

Art helps us to stand beside the parts of ourselves we may not like (or the parts of ourselves that may not like us). It teaches us to walk alongside our fear, our pain, our shame, our disgust, and even our pathologies. Art grows from the soil of our souls in the cracks between those parts. And if we embrace that growth, we will, in time and by design, learn to do more than to stand or even walk. We will rise. We will take flight. And from there, the destination is up to us.

And this, lovelies and gentles, is how we stART.

More highlights from the exhibit can be found at the Wyandot Behavioral Health Network’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/WyandotBHN/.