Share
IMPart
IMPart (Injured Military Personnel + Art) connects recent Injured Military Personnel with visual arts experiences created for relaxed social engagement, the improvement and redevelopment of fine motor skills, post-traumatic growth, and expressive catharsis. Here at the League, our Ceramics Department Chair, Brian Grow and veteran artist Rich McAfee work with various volunteers and Fort Belvoir staff to help bring visual art experiences to wounded veterans and their caregivers.
Every Wednesday, veterans are provided individualized instruction and creative encouragement in clay and blacksmithing.
IMPart's Impact
These experiences have positive and profound individual impact as illustrated in a note received IMPART participant and Wounded Warrior Sergeant First Class William H. Roberts:
I want to write to personally thank you for helping us heal both physically and mentally and for creating an atmosphere of joy and happiness. I wish that there could be a place like this with people like you in every state.
…and, by the experience of IMPART participant Jon Meadows, who is recovering from a frontal-lobe traumatic brain injury he suffered in Afghanistan:
It’s helpful with my eyesight, it’s helpful with my fine motor skills, it helped me to think more and just to do so much with cognition and things like that. So many different skills that are involved in art that a lot of people don’t know they’re using, but you’re using it. And it’s actually helping through a therapeutic way and it’s enjoyable. So, it’s a totally different way of helping someone. When I express myself like this, it gives me a sense of relief, release, it just calms you down. You just go to another place and it takes away every other problem that you have, and you just feel good. And, then you’re just lost in the moment of making something. After you’re done with it and you make it and you see other people they like it. Especially, when you see somebody look at your work and then it means something to them. That means a lot. It really touches you. I get so much out of it.
IMPart on the Creativity in Action blog
IMPart connects recent Injured Military Personnel with visual arts experiences created for personal enrichment, relaxed social engagement, the improvement and redevelopment of fine motor skills, and expressive catharsis.
On Veteran’s Day, we wanted to share arts organizations and programs that work with veterans.
Grab your calendar! These four special exhibits & events are coming to The Art League in November (and one in December).
In addition to the visual arts, there are programs in writing and performing arts serving varying groups including veterans, current service members, their families, and caregivers.
Your help is needed to support The Art League’s future!
Your support of The Art League reflects where you envision the world of creativity will take us tomorrow. Are you ready to map the future for your — and your community’s — creative life?