yeesh.

Posted January 5th, 2007 by Michelle

After working a 10 1/2 hour day, I went to an opening tonight for all of the folks who create art at Napa Valley Support Services. This came on the heels of a online discussion with some friends about the parents who have surgically altered their extremely developmentally disabled little girl. These parents opted for surgeries that keep the girl eternally young, small, and asexualized, and I had a very strong negative reaction to what they had chosen to do. But tonight I spent the evening surrounded by art- beautiful, moving, colorful, vibrant art- made by men and women in their 30’s and 40’s who either live in group homes or with their parents, many of whom are completely non-verbal.

You certainly wouldn’t have looked at all the art and known that it was made by severely mentally disabled people. It was all expressionistic, but that’s nothing really unusual. But- they have these huge flat files for each artist/patient/student, and the guy who runs the program pulled out some of the files to show us, and then you figured out pretty quickly that the artist was… well, I would say “obsessed” if I didn’t know better. Each flat file was filled with picture after picture of basically the exact same image, or something very close. One woman only drew horizons, one color for the ground, one for the sky, one for the sun, all in thick, thick crayon, but there were thousands- quite literally thousands- of the pictures. She had numerous books filled as well as loose papers. Every one was slightly different, or very different, as far as the colors. It was like a color study. But the violence with which she used the crayons and the repetition of the image was haunting.

I met a couple of the artists, and I met the man who is running the program, and I feel so completely ashamed and humbled, that I would know the first f*cking thing about what it would mean to take care of someone who is that disabled. And these people feel- god, do they feel, it’s all over their art- and I wonder what it must be like, to be trapped like that, or maybe, to be completely and utterly set free like that. I don’t know which it is. I have no clue. People talk about me doing “great work”. I know I do important work, that is meaningful and what not, but the man I met tonight, who is running this art program, broke my heart. He showed me, simply by how he spoke of the student’s work, and of the progress so many of them have made over the past year, and by how he enveloped me in love when I first walked in the door, just what doing really great work in this world means. There is so much I don’t know, so much I haven’t seen, so much hardship that I’ve never come close to experiencing. It’s difficult to take. I’m a little bit afraid of these folks, these severely disabled people, and even more so now that I’ve seen what is inside of them, waiting to be expressed, and I don’t want to be afraid. But there is so much to fix, I don’t know where to start.