Link:
http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2010/06/school-of-the-art-institutes-art-therapy-program/Chicago arts magazine wrote:
Chicago’s School of the Art Institute has one of the oldest professional programs in art therapy. Students in their Master of the Arts in Art Therapy program take forty-eight course credits (thirty-nine in art therapy and nine in studio electives) over two to four years as well as gain a minimum of nine hundred hours of clinical experience, completing two field work assignments, one with either children or adolescents and the other with either adults or seniors. The art therapy courses range in medium and approach. Students can, for example, take courses in Video & the Human Experience, Psychopathology, Family Art Therapy and Counseling Techniques.
Recent student M.A. theses have addressed Rendering visibility: art therapy and queer theory, Making room to heal: the collaborative creation of an art therapy program for and with women who have experienced homelessness and Cognitive art therapy: exploring negative thoughts through image making. The faculty is dedicated to applying their knowledge outside of the classroom. Catherine Moon, the Chair of the program, recently published Materials and Media in Art Therapy: Critical Understandings of Diverse Artistic Vocabularies and spends her summers working in Africa with local AIDS survivors, encouraging the use of local materials in their maintenance of sustainability and movements towards social action.
In addition to the formal program, in October 2009, the graduate students formed a SAIC Chapter of the Art Therapy Association, programming monthly events—public lectures, symposium and art exhibits—in order to acquire further knowledge from outside of the curriculum and develop their art-making practices. Sangeetha Ravichandran, the student leader and co-founder of the group, states, “We have been a very active student association trying to gain more insight into art, social action and art based help, however, we do not limit ourselves to those particular topics.
In their operating first school year, the group brought in both “superstar art therapists” Pat Allen and Harriet Wadeson for a workshop and a talk, respectively. They also organized an art show, titled Social Bodies: Examining the Hybridity of Identity, for which they made and displayed art so as to conduct an intersectional analysis of their own races, classes, genders and sexualities as well as explore their biases and privileges in the society. While this student group is still in its infancy, it should be exciting to see how it develops and continues to engage both the art therapy and art exhibition communities of the city.
Chicago’s significant art therapy community is largely due to the number and quality of graduate students coming out of SAIC. While there are many schools of thought in the art therapy field, SAIC has recently begun steering away from psychoanalysis and limiting schools of thought and choosing to instead focus on relational and culturally sensitive ways of thinking. Alumni practicing in Chicago use art therapy in a variety of manners, some focusing more on the positive effects of art making and others using art as a point of metaphor or medium of communication. The Illinois Art Therapy Association (IATA) connects all art therapists in the Illinois area, and the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) is the national organization. SAIC graduate students and alumni regularly attend both local and national conferences held by these two organizations.
