Journey Gallery
Overview
At its core, the Journey Gallery is a wall that was built under the pavilion behind Haven House to support a communal art project. On this wall is a nearly 200 sq. ft. art frame with 32 regular and 10 double-sized openings.
The smaller openings provide space for local female artists to hang art made specifically to be seen by women recovering from trauma. The larger openings are for the residents of Haven House to display their own art.
In addition to size and weatherproofing guidelines, the community artists are asked to adhere to a color palette of primarily green, blue, purple, and neutrals so their works collectively form a cohesive secondary frame surrounding and supporting the larger openings, directing focus to the artwork created by the residents, which have no restrictions. Other than that, community artists are encouraged to create whatever kind of art they feel women recovering from trauma would want or need to see. Finally, the community artists are invited to create Artist Connections by recording a video explaining their art and delivering whatever message they would like to women who are recovering from trauma.
The Chronicles of Progress
The Journey Gallery is a simple concept with an extensive series of increasingly ambitious goals not just for Haven House residents, but ultimately aiming to help trauma survivors, artists, and philanthropists around the world. The primary objective, though, is to help residents of Haven House to overcome feelings of hopelessness.
This will begin by encouraging residents to participate in the common art therapy exercise of painting their feelings, then putting their work up on the wall. Creating art can feel pointless if the art is just tucked away in a folder afterward; art exists to be displayed and shared with the world. On this art wall, the residents’ work will be in places of honor: Their frames are twice as large as the others with highlighted backgrounds and dedicated art spotlights. Having a dedicated art display space is a powerful force multiplier. It gives residents a public space for them to express themselves, giving them an avenue to have their feelings and lived experiences witnessed and acknowledged by others.
This effect will be compounded as residents continue painting their feelings. The frames for their artwork are very large and, being twice the size of the others, are designed to look normal displaying two or more works in the same frame. By encouraging residents to not immediately take down their previous art, but instead add to it, their artwork becomes a chronicle of their healing journey, which itself can provide additional therapeutic effects.
Trauma recovery doesn’t happen overnight. Incremental improvements can be missed or taken for granted, especially by people in pain. It’s all too easy for people in recovery to mistake slow progress for no progress and become frustrated or lose faith in therapy altogether. By mounting multiple works—even just two—residents can see tangible evidence of their healing progress, which, as with all types of interventions, reinforces the behaviors that brought them results.
Residents successfully completing their therapy program and moving out are encouraged to leave their artwork on the communal wall, at least for a while, because the most powerful impact of all will come later, when new residents move in.
Breaking the Hopelessness Cycle
Moving into a new environment is stressful, especially when that new environment a group home full of many new people.
Compounding that, whether overtly expressed or not, feelings of hopelessness are rampant, particularly at the beginning of trauma recovery, and can remain a persistent barrier to progress. After all, people do not enter into long-term trauma recovery programs lightly. Before taking such a drastic measure, they have tried many other methods to feel better, but nothing has healed them yet. After enough perceived failures, it can be hard to believe that anything can ever work. And after enough bad days in a row, it can feel like there might never be a good day again.
Feelings of hopelessness are part of a negative cycle that includes apathy, lethargy, withdrawal, self-doubt, self-neglect, and emotional dysregulation. People think “Since nothing has worked before, why will this attempt be any different? And if it’s doomed to fail, why put in any effort?” This cycle must be broken to truly heal, and to break it, residents must genuinely believe that such healing is even possible.
That’s where the communal art wall’s greatest power comes into play.
In the denouement of The Shawshank Redemption, Red exits prison and moves into an apartment meant to help rehabilitate him, but immediately sees “Brooks was here” carved in a rafter—soul-crushing evidence that the rehabilitation program did not work for the person who lived there before him. The communal art wall purposefully engineers the opposite of that poignant moment by showing the chronicles of the people who came before—who lived in the same house, perhaps even the same room, and who went through the same program that newcomers are about to start. The wall will display a collection of the emotional equivalent of before-and-after photos at a weight loss clinic. New residents will presumably identify more with the “before” photos, and the contrast between the artwork made at the beginning and end of the recovery program will serve as tangible proof that the system works.
The hopelessness cycle is self-perpetuating and notoriously difficult to break. Since this evidence comes in the form of amateur art rather than charts or lectures, though, it is innocuous and palatable—a Trojan horse designed to be accepted into consciousness and understood before the hopelessness cycle intervenes to preemptively reject it to preserve a consistently negative worldview.
The strategy is to overwhelm the mind with incontrovertible evidence that healing is possible, which will eventually make thoughts of hopelessness cause cognitive dissonance because they are incompatible with observed reality. When those thoughts of hopelessness become unbearably uncomfortable, they will be rejected and the cycle will break down because all parts of it depend on the belief that things can’t ever get better.
Ancillary Benefits
Having a dedicated art display space can make creating art seem more worthwhile, so it can encourage residents to participate in this cathartic and stimulating activity, providing a non-verbal outlet for expressing and processing difficult emotions and memories associated with trauma. Creating art can also help individuals to externalize their experiences, gain new perspectives, foster a sense of accomplishment and purpose, and rebuild a sense of control and agency.
Furthermore, the works shared by local artists can help combat feelings of loneliness and disconnectedness by showing evidence of others in the community who care about them and not only empathize, but sympathize with their pain. Many of the local women participating have experienced serious trauma themselves, and in their videos, some explain how trauma has affected their lives or how it shows in their artwork.
Finally, knowing their work will be seen by other incoming residents can also have a significant and therapeutic effect. Residents will remember the art they saw upon their own arrival and know their own art can live on after they’ve gone to help others like they were helped, which adds a new dimension of meaning to their trauma and recovery journey.
This is especially powerful for people with serious self-esteem issues—specifically those who believe they aren’t worth much, so things that help them aren’t worth much, either. However, this shows how their own healing can help others, which sidesteps their negative thinking and forces them to recognize and accept positivity without diminishing it due to low self-esteem. Even if they don’t feel like they were worth all the trouble to heal, they can recognize that the work they did to heal themselves can also help heal others, and if they can help heal others, then ipso facto they must have intrinsic value themselves.
Beyond Haven House
Mobile Gallery
Interest in participating in this project has been high and appears to exceed the capacity of the Journey Gallery wall. If there are ever enough additional works of art to fill a second wall, we plan to build one: a scale model of the wall that is designed to be moved between locations which could be featured at various art shows and charity events. This would benefit...
- ...residents, as, although their identities will remain anonymous, those who choose to participate will have their stories shared, which can lead to emotional relief and catharsis, reduce shame and isolation, and give them a sense of control over the experience, on top of adding more meaning to their trauma and recovery journey by helping others.
- ...the community, since the premise of this project is interesting and culturally significant, and this display could raise awareness of the prevalence of trauma and reduce the stigma of recovery therapy.
- ...artists by exposing their artwork to a larger audience, including people who might not necessarily regularly collect artwork but who might feel a connection due to the subject matter and presentation.
Helping Other Causes
The Journey Gallery is a project designed to be shared. The frame was designed to be copied and built easily without any special tools or construction experience. The frame concept is flexible and could be executed in hundreds of ways, from using an existing gallery space to simply painting frame lines on a wall. The overall concept itself is also flexible in that it doesn’t have anything inherently to do with trauma recovery and could be used for many other causes. In total, all aspects of the Journey Gallery were designed to be easily adapted by others; the difficult part is the administration.
To that end, we created an application that stores all the information required to administer the Journey Gallery, including communicating with participating artists and keeping track of all participants’ contributions. We also integrated that with the application that enables Artist Connections, as there was some overlap of functionality. We have been developing this software with the intention of distributing this app so that others can use it to manage their own gallery wall projects.
This can be used by any other organizations seeking to organize a collaborative art project, which will help not only them but also the artists, as it helps facilitate a model that allows artists to participate in a mutually beneficial way.
The Museum Model
Artists are bombarded with requests to donate their art to various causes—too many to fulfill them all, despite the high ratio of artists with big hearts. Often these works of art are seen only for a short time by a limited audience, then auctioned under these suboptimal conditions along with other donated items. For charities that seek to build awareness, converting artwork into money to then spend on other efforts is incredibly inefficient compared to the awareness that artwork can generate when displayed differently. After all, as opposed to a gift basket or a voucher for golf lessons, a work of art has enduring utility to all who see it, not just those who win a specific auction.
Instead of donating artwork outright to the Journey Gallery (or other projects like it), artists simply lend their artwork to be displayed—just like with a museum. The art remains theirs, and they can take it back at any time. When they do take it back, they will also receive a provenance certificate that explains the project and when their work was shown there, along with a QR code that links to a Journey Gallery page that verifies their participation and includes their video about the piece and any other information they’d like to include about themselves and their work. In this way, this model is like putting their art in a bank, where it effectively accrues interest and is worth more when they withdraw it because of its provenance: the verified record of where the art has been displayed and the purpose it served there. Artists who are happy with the process can then create and deposit another work and start over again. This creates an avenue for artists to regularly help charitable causes while gaining exposure and for a communal art project to regularly get new art to display. Under this model, all parties benefit instead of artists making costly sacrifices to help inefficiently while benefiting little themselves.