Drawing on Memory: A Unique Art Exhibit at Mustard Seed

A unique art show will open at The Mustard Seed Project’s Crandall Center in September. The exhibiting artists are all residents of the memory care home across the street, part of TMSP’s assisted living project for elders.

That project, The Village, consists of a single longhouse divided into three homes, each with 10 private rooms for singles or couples. One home is for elders living with cognitive issues. Those 11 residents were invited to participate in a weekly program in June called Opening Minds Through Art (OMA). Each person was paired with a volunteer to assist with materials and ideas.

OMA came to The Village through Julie Crane, TMSP programs manager, and Rachel Petersen, an integrated arts instructor at Lutheran Community Services Northwest. They were both trained in the OMA program, an award-winning, evidence-based therapy developed at Miami University in 2007. It is designed to help people with dementia remain engaged with others by producing personal artwork.

“We kind of just oversee, Rachel and I,” Crane said. “At the end, we take the artist’s finished work, and we hold it up in a frame. You should see their faces when they get to see their finished art with the frame around it. That’s my favorite part.”

Crane earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in human services at Western Washington University, then spent two years with AmeriCorps, one with Tacoma-Pierce County Habitat for Humanity, and another with the National Civilian Community Corps. She was a social worker at a skilled nursing facility in 2021 when construction began for The Village. “That’s what got my attention,” she said. She moved to TMSP.

Petersen said she started working with elders as an intern in college, and has now been with Lutheran Community Services for four years, working in music and art therapy programs.

“I am involved with Lutheran to enrich people’s lives,” she said. “I am not an artist, so I came into this with no actual art experience, but it’s totally failure-free. Anyone can do it.”

Tables pushed together in the common room near the kitchen were lined with residents and volunteers sitting side by side, experimenting with different materials to create vastly different images.

“For people who are very hesitant, who’ve disengaged more and more, they see it’s possible to just pick up a paintbrush and just go for it,” Petersen said. “Some people really start opening up, opening up their wall.”

A reporter asked an artist named Paula, 89, about an abstract watercolor landscape she was painting. It appeared to be a road disappearing into a desert, seen through a window.

“It’s a bird; that’s the beak,” she said, pointing. “Maybe it’s the foot.”

Despite that loose interpretation, Paula was able and eager to describe the imagery and history of a pair of silver bracelets she was wearing.

“I got these in Mexico when I was 40,” she said. “You can see the palms, and the golden sunset,” she pointed at those details in the metalwork. “I got this other one in Santa Fe,” she said, showing off her other wrist, then a patch of skin. “And this is psoriasis! I don’t know where I got that.”

Paula’s volunteer was Joanne Rodriguez Lemon, 66, a part-time physical therapist for elders who’s lived on the Key Peninsula since 2010.

“It’s fun to watch them, their choices on what they pick and the reasons why,” she said of her artists. “But it helps me because I want to direct and give instructions and educate on this and that, and I can’t do any of that here. I gotta keep my mouth shut and ask you your opinion all the time, and what you want to do, not say what it’s supposed to do or how you’re supposed to go about it. It might help me a little bit by listening just a little bit better.”

Renée, another artist, was working on what appeared to be an underwater scene.

“It’s some kind of plant, a colorful kelp, maybe, except you can’t see what colors underwater. It’s all various shades of brown and green.” Renée said she’d never painted anything before. She couldn’t remember how long she’d been living in The Village. “I just found out that I’m 89 years old,” she said.

“I started volunteering with Mustard Seed before I retired, so it goes at least back to 2009,” said Neal van der Voorn, who works with the artists. “I wasn’t quite so enthusiastic about this program. But Julie said, ‘Neal, you want to volunteer for this.’

“I have no art background, but I could see what some of the residents get out of it,” he said. “For me, you know — I’m 82 — I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years. This experience gives me some insight into what to expect.”

Another long-term volunteer, Ray Steier, said, “I put my whole heart and soul into doing this, sustaining people with memory issues, and art is a therapeutic thing to help them. I think the people that are here are getting someone who cares, who is present with them, and helps them do a project where they can get out of themselves and do something in a group, and get to share some activity, and something of themselves.”

Some residents left the session soon after finishing, while others who had been absent joined. Crane and Petersen made a point of interacting with each of them and putting frames on completed artwork for display.

“I always wanted to work this way, honestly; I just think it’s a blast,” Petersen said. “I was really just interested in how I could spread joy, how I could make lives a little happier. It really doesn’t feel like work.”