To the Editor:
We were happy to see your piece on Leeway patients visiting the Yale Art Gallery (“Gallery Experience Inspires Art Therapy,” 10/9), but I do want to point out that the gallery’s education department conducts similar programs that combine looking at and making art. For the past four years “Giant Steps,” an arts therapy program based at the Veterans Hospital in West Haven, has brought veterans here one day a week for the month of July to study a specific collection and then, working with an artist on the gallery’s staff, to produce their own creations. Volunteer docents Nancy Hoskins and Al Harary have been particularly involved with this program.
Another docent, Barbara Gaab, goes each week to the women’s oncology unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital with a portfolio of reproductions of works in Yale’s collection and converses with patients about the art and anything else they want to discuss. This project, in its ninth year, is enormously popular with both the patients and hospital staff.
A project involving Yale undergraduate gallery guides working with patients in the children’s wing of Yale-New Haven Hospital is underway.
Mary Kordak
October 10, 2002
The writer is the Jan & Frederick Mayer Curator of Education at the Yale University Art Gallery.