Laumeier Sculpture Park, an Arts and Education Council operating support grantee, will kickstart its year-long exploration of healing and wellness with its first exhibition of 2022, Salutary Sculpture, on view February 12 - May 15 in the Aronson Fine Arts Center’s Whitaker Foundation Gallery. This group exhibition presents a selection of eight artists who explore art’s capacity as a therapeutic tool for adaptation, recovery and rehabilitation.

It is well established that art has salutary (“producing a beneficial effect” or “promoting health”) effects, both for makers and for viewers/audiences/participants. artists include Thomas J. Condon, Hope Ginsburg, Basil Kincaid, Marcos Lutyens, Guadalupe Maravilla, Dario Robleto, James Sterling Pitt and Lauryn Youden.  Many of the artists gathered came to their current work through a process of their own physical and/or psychic recovery. The exhibition will feature sculpture, photography, video, drawings and performance.

This exhibition is co-curated by Laumeier Executive Director Lauren Ross and Curator Dana Turkovic. Turkovic shared, “Laumeier is in a unique position to help promote well-being through art and through nature. The artists assembled here address a range of personal experiences and research interests, and each artwork in the exhibition reveals the power of art as a therapeutic tool. We hope visitors will find inspiration in how these artists use their creativity as a way to heal the body and mind and as a process to work through individual—and sometimes societal— trauma and tackle adversity.”

In the midst of an ongoing global pandemic and world-wide reckonings around systemic inequality and injustice, humans are experiencing a heightened need for coping and recovery. In addition to the timely nature of those demands, Salutary Sculpture acknowledges artists’ longstanding embrace of transformation, change, and adaptation. In other words, art’s role in healing is nothing new.

Inspired by Salutary Sculpture, programs throughout 2022 will also feature the themes of health and wellness. Some of these programs will be led by Laumeier’s Cultural Thinker In Residence— an individual who helps develop interdisciplinary programming. Laumeier’s 2022 Cultural Thinker in Residence is Shelly Goebl-Parker, Professor of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University- Edwardsville. Her research and teaching involves the therapeutic intersections of art, social work, and community arts collaborations, with an eye towards increasing multicultural competence.

Visit laumeier.org for the most up-to-date list of programs including many free public programs related to the exhibition.

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