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Mixing mini art prints with social advocacy, the graduate class, SOCW 689: Clinical Practice with Older Adults, explores the significance of Free Little Art Galleries in communities.
What happens when a Free Little Art Gallery invites social workers as artists?
The exploration came to life on March 19th, when Stacey Schwartz brought her Free Little Art Gallery to Professor Miki Nishida Goerdt's class to teach about community engagement within the arts. Stacey Schwartz is a 2023 MA Arts Management alum and MFA Arts Management student. When she isn't studying, she is the curator of the Free Little Art Gallery (FLAG) in Arlington, VA. FLAGs first started during COVID to bring joy to the community. From there, Stacey’s FLAG has become a staple in her community. The gallery brings audiences and artists from all over the country to give or take art from her gallery, creating connections between people and making art accessible to many.
Recently, her gallery has expanded to include projects with older adults in her community. Building on a current grant that she received from Arlington Arts to work with Aspire Afterschool Learning, Stacey Schwartz is working closely with partners to create an intergenerational project that brings children and older adults together through tiny art. "These relationships are so powerful and meaningful for our community," Stacey Schwartz remarks.
Building on community engagement, this project caught the attention of Professor Miki Nishida Goerdt from GM's College of Public Health in the Department of Social Work. Professor Goerdt is an art therapist, artist, and licensed social worker whose work explores the intersections of arts, mental health, and social justice advocacy. During this class, she explained how art such as printmaking and zines could be tools for social workers to generate collaborations with others. Her multidisciplinary approach teaches social work students how to use available community resources to better serve people.
Professor Goerdt invited Stacey Schwartz to collaborate and present on FLAGs to the master of social work students who were learning how to work with older adults. Stacey began by explaining how her FLAG started and the behind the scenes of how she manages the gallery. She says that art comes and goes daily, and after about a week or so she puts what doesn't get taken aside to be given to other Free Little Art Galleries in the area. She also spoke about successful collaborations such as bringing the gallery into schools. Finally, she showed her funded projects that provide art supplies at the gallery and talked about her goals for upcoming collaborations. Besides art, her gallery encourages community; from her coffee and creativity events to adding art that urges people to vote.
After Stacey's presentation, Professor Goerdt encouraged students to participate in the gallery by teaching them printmaking. Bringing in her own supplies, she demonstrated how to draw on a mini, foam plate and how to make a print with the mini plate. Students drew illustrations of a world without ageism. They worked on making a zine about dismantling ageism a week before, and this learning activity was a sequence to it. Students’ printed images included drawings of trees, hearts, flowers, and more. A common theme was nature, representing growth and connection.
Professor Goerdt explained the rationale for this activity as follows, “In my class, students and I discussed how ageism is the least challenged form of discrimination in society; We often think it's acceptable to judge people based on one's age. This ends up producing negative consequences at the individual level and the societal level. Knowing this, we all need to use our creativity to imagine how we can be different. Imagination is very important for social justice work -- We can't just keep saying what we have is not working. We also need to be able to have the vision of what we want for the society we live in.”
This hands-on activity gave students a deeper understanding into how Free Little Art Galleries operate within a community and creates a positive impact in society. As Professor Goerdt remarks, "Stacey is amazing at building a supportive network with others who want to make a difference in the community. I felt my students would learn much from how she was operating her gallery because of it."
After the activity, Professor Goerdt brought the pieces to Stacey's Free Little Art Gallery.
The prints are packaged with the zine and are available in Stacey's Free Little Art Gallery for a limited period of time. Feel free to check them out on AMGT's account and Stacey's account! Or go to Arlington, VA, to check them out!