This article describes a small group of preadolescent, psychiatric inpatients and their collaborative painting of a memorial mural about the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. Through an immersion in the group experience, the group members became increasingly introspective about their feelings of loss and their…

An investigation of art criticism was undertaken with studio artists, art therapists, college nonart majors, and clients receiving art therapy services. The method involved establishing aesthetic and expressive criteria taken from Kramer's (1971) concept of formed expression. Utilizing her concepts of "evocative feeling," "inner consistency," and…

The purpose of this study was to find out if the Draw a Story (DAS) assessment can be used as a screening technique to identify children and adolescents at risk for aggression. Four art therapists presented the DAS tasks to 30 students with histories of aggressive behavior and to 181 students with no histories of aggression. After the 211…

The Open Studio Project (OSP) is a nonprofit arts and social service organization. This report presents the OSP process as a model of social action. It describes how the model was implemented in a particular community to address a need for arts programs for at risk youth. "Art & Action," an outreach program of OSP, became a unique year round after…

The number of immigrant and refugee children coming from war-torn countries is increasing in North America. Over the past decades, creative expression activities have been increasingly recognized as a useful way to work with migrant and refugee children. These activities have been used to help them to construct meaning, to structure identity, and…

Art has been considered to be a valuable therapeutic tool with children and adolescents who are experiencing grief. This article explores the use of art within the context of group bereavement counseling. The literatures concerning the effectiveness of grief groups and the use of art therapy with children are reviewed, and a case study of a…

This highly practical book presents current developments in play therapy, including innovative applications for particular problems and populations. Contributors first discuss the latest ideas and techniques emerging from object-relations, experiential, dynamic, and narrative perspectives. Next, research evaluating the effectiveness of play…

Presenting an integrative model for treating traumatized children, this book combines play, art, and other expressive therapies with ideas and strategies drawn from cognitive-behavioral and family therapy. Eliana Gil demonstrates how to tailor treatment to the needs of each child by using both directive and nondirective approaches. Throughout,…

Recent advances in neuroscience describe the effect of experience on neural architecture. Paralleling these advances in neuroscience, recent explorations in the field of art therapy speculate on the relationship between specific therapeutic interventions and neuroplasticity, which underlies the changes in neural architecture. One such…

Through a review of the literature on art therapy, a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the arts and art therapy for young children, and a survey of various techniques and uses of art therapy, this paper examines how children translate their perceptual world into their drawings. The paper notes that art therapy is, primarily, a means…

Seven presentations are featured from a 1980 conference on the role of art in the lives of people with handicaps. Three major themes were addressed in that conference: roles and responsibilities of art educators and art therapists, training and professional development, and programing. Each theme is addressed initially by summarized comments from…

Compiled are selected papers on learning disabilities from the Seventh Annual International Conference of the Association for Children with Learning Disabilities (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 12-14, 1970). Included in the collection are two keynote addresses, two papers concerning parents, three reports on evaluation and five dealing with…

The serial drawing technique is described and use with two cases is discussed. Paper presented at World Federation for Mental Health Congress, Vancouver, 1977. (Author)

While art education and art therapy each have distinctive features, they are not totally separate entities in the educational field, since overlap occurs in setting, subjects, training, theoretical orientation, and program content. (MB)

The visual arts lend themselves naturally to contemplation of self. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of art therapy in increasing self-awareness of participants in an art therapy class are examined. The independent variables under consideration were participation status, university classification, type of instruction, and…