“What are You All Going to Do to Keep Black Women in Art Therapy?”:

Leah Amaral

“What are you all going to do to keep Black women in art therapy?” The urgency of this question is driven by a silence that has threatened my learning and participation in art therapy educational settings as a Black art therapist in training. I am actively choosing to break that silence. Reading the call for culture-specific approaches to art therapy and more “third world” identifying individuals to be trained as art therapists in Joseph (1974) brought me to reflect on my personal experience of being an art therapy graduate student and a Black, middle-class, cis-gender, woman. My body traverses the terrain of privilege and oppression. This is the complexity of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989). It is important for me to emphasize that asking questions and breaking the silence is a choice of my survival in this field. Patricia Hill Collins (1998) stated:

Direct encounters with race and gender bias are silencing forces that have impacted me. Conversely, I have used silence as a strategy in order to survive my art therapy education. Collins (1998) explained, “Silencing occurs when Black women are restrained from confronting racism, sexism, and elitism in public transcripts because doing so remains dangerous” (p. 50). I broke my silence at the CPAT conference because I finally felt safe enough to advocate for myself. I felt affirmed and validated through the shared experiences that I witnessed during the conference. I saw multiple Black women and other women of color, who were educators, practitioners, researchers, and program directors, speak about their experience in the creative arts therapies in response to Joseph’s work. This impacted my sense of knowing that there is a place for my voice to be heard.

Engaging with Joseph’s work and the dialogue at the CPAT conference brought to my realization that in order for change to occur, I must break through the silence to address the problematic ways that access, knowledge, language, representation, and power have existed within my educational experience. Much of my coursework has centered “pioneers” and authoritative theories within art therapy. I was not assigned any literature about Joseph’s leading “work with psychiatric patients in which he used murals as a modality of expression and communication” (Hiscox, 1997, p.273). I did not learn that Joseph was present at the historic meeting to form a national organization, now known as AATA (Hiscox, 1997). I did not hear about a community of Black art therapists that have long existed in the field of art therapy. The information presented in my courses did not reflect or affirm my experience as a Black art therapist in training.

I must convey the degree to which my Blackness and femaleness have been made visible and simultaneously invisible across a broad spectrum of encounters during my training. Much of my learning has been consumed by discussions about the racism and sexism that I experience. I have learned to become an art therapist while navigating the demands of my safety and survival in the art therapy education system. I pose four questions in response to my encounter with Joseph’s work and my present-day experience: Whose knowledge is being presented within art therapy programs as authoritative? How are these programs ensuring that classroom dynamics are not mirroring oppressive norms? How are supervisors being trained to support Black student interns? How can Black students be better supported in their internship experiences?

Johanna Tesfaye

I attended my first AATA conference in November 2017 in Albuquerque, NM. I planned to scope out current research, practice, and professionals, and determine my interests in specific art therapy graduate programs. I felt alone and quickly overwhelmed—a familiar feeling. The number of white conference attendees was overpowering. As I made my way to the Newcomer’s Meeting, I dreaded what the conference and the profession had in store for me. This would be another trial in which I would have to defend my right to exist and thrive in academic and professional institutions that claim to be diverse and inclusionary.

Gwendolyn Short spotted me immediately and made her way over. She introduced me to Cheryl Doby-Copeland, Delora Putnam Bryant, and the Multicultural Committee, inviting me into a world of art therapists of color in the profession. They were holding a place for me. This gesture left an impression that continues to encourage me as I pursue this profession. This labor of holding appears to be the sole responsibility of BIPOC art therapists and students. Without these connections, the academic and professional aspirations of BIPOC students can feel like lost battles. Creating a support structure or a strategy of place-making, however, is often up to art therapists at the individual level. Therefore, these efforts function as temporary relief from an otherwise neglectful system (Gipson, 2019). As a Black woman beginning in art therapy, it is incredibly important for me to figure out ways to support others and be supported in my education. The experience of exclusion in art therapy education is not mine alone. It is shared with other Black art therapy students. We struggle to navigate our classrooms, internships, research, and wider professional spaces while feeling systematically un-supported, isolated, and completely responsible for our survival and development.

How is it that the creative arts therapies face the same systematic exclusionary practices Joseph critiqued in 1974? Who continues to be left out, and what fundamental changes need to be made to ensure support for BIPOC? Joseph (2006) conceptualized the creative alliance and argued that a political purpose is a crucial component of this process. He outlined alliances as collaborative relationships that identify the dynamics of institutional, organizational, and individual racism and oppression in the pursuit of group health. It is our collective responsibility to understand our personal experiences within a social context and work towards creative visions for a future that hold and center the history, education, practice, and experience of Black people and Black art therapists.

Marisol Norris

My academic experience ushered a profound understanding of what it means to inhabit the music therapy profession as a Black woman. I attended one of few music therapy graduate programs in the United States that attempted to address diversity and equity within multiple facets of education and training. I experienced the luxury of being one of two Black masters' students in the music therapy program and having courses dedicated to exploring the sociocultural foundations of music therapy counseling and the multiple perspectives that would influence our work. However, the responsibility of tending to the invisibility of Black narratives and personhood, as I tended to my own, was nonetheless palpable. What became commonplace was the tangential knowledge often suppressed by white counterparts when discussing music therapy education—matriculation within the profession demanded that Black students yield to unhemmed whiteness and the subjugation of their own erasure. The singular white lens that permeated music therapy theory and praxis minimally allowed discussions of Black service recipients in ways that acknowledged their complexity and socio-political realities. Musical engagements were rarely noted as aesthetic means of perceiving and being in their socio-political context, informed by their agented existence and their subjectivity dislodged from the white gaze (Norris, 2020). And although noted white music therapy leaders utilized Black musical traditions to undergird foundational theories of the profession (i.e., Juliette Alvin’s free improvisation), we minimally explored their post-modernist commitments to Black lifeworlds and its political economy in building the profession. Consequently, the political relevance of Black aesthetic constructions and their direct connection to the active music-making of Black service recipients were absent from classroom discourse.

When I mustered the will to question the commodification of Black musical representations or the complexities of personhood when referring to Black music therapy service recipients, educators, while at times acknowledging difference, more readily referenced the universalities of creative processes. The communal work of Black therapists, artists, scholars, and cultural workers contributed to the critical discourse of community music and health that influenced the profession's contemporary existence. The references of this work were primarily anecdotal with a few readings and lectures that centered essentialist interpretations of Black aesthetic experiences. The history and genealogies of the profession that would foster my sense of belonging did not include BIPOC music therapist such as Fran Goldberg and her extensive contribution to the practice of music psychotherapy and guided imagery and music, or the significant contributions of Richard Graham in the unification of the American Association of Music Therapy and National Association of Music Therapy that produced the American Music Therapy Association (Kahler II, 1997), or Zane Ragland and Maurice Apprey's (1974) early use of the term "community music therapy" and work in Black communities, or Carolynn Kenny and her book, Field of Play, that amplified Indigenous aesthetic frameworks (Kenny, 1989). Similarly, when I expressed a need to develop skills that supported culturally responsive practice, educators often circumvented politically-relevant theories and skills in favor of dominant psychodynamic approaches with little emphasis on positionality or intersectionality within therapeutic spaces. Training did not tend to the mono- and cross-cultural dynamics Black trainees would navigate in practice settings or culturally sustaining approaches that would deepen effectiveness with non-white service recipients. While non-Black students also suffered from the depoliticized training pervasive throughout most arts therapies academic programs in the United States and internationally, the education I received better suited white middle-class women.

I found refuge with Black arts therapies students in my graduate programs. Their unwavering determination, intelligence, beauty, presence, creativity, refusal, and care became home. The active “world-making” (Nash, 2019, p. 27) that held these common experiences of “place” and “place making” (Gipson, 2019) soon expanded to include the influence of BIPOC therapists, educators, and creators, in and outside of the music therapy profession, and the interdisciplinary critiques of Black feminist and womanist scholars who permitted their bodies as bridges to my own learning. Altogether, they helped me to consider approaches that preserved human dignity and to ask questions that many Black arts therapists eventually contend: What does it mean to have our rich interior subjected to white, imperialist, capitalist, ableist, hetero-patriarchal gaze, and all its peculiarities? What does it mean to have Black skin and to wear white masks? What is forfeited in accepting a dominant lens in music therapy—our creativity, artistic expression, communities, being? And in what ways must we become free? While the answers to these questions have become more and more known at various junctures in my academic and professional career, the need for place and placemaking is no less remarkable.

Many BIPOC arts therapy students, educators, and practitioners have centered our common displacement and marginalization across institutions and professional borders; yet, this “third-worldness” within the creative arts therapies detailed by Joseph (1974) in Art Therapy and the Third World persists. The pervasive anti-Black violence that continues to render us invisible index the interlocking structures of domination within the arts therapies and the commitments to systems of harm upheld by the dominant mass. These systems that exist on continuums of social and physical harm devalue and weaponize Black and Indigenous knowledge, attempt to assault BIPOC students’ and therapists’ sense of self and communal ties, and often punish those who choose to push against the status quo. While harm is readily exhibited across our professional organizations, arts therapies research and literary canons, and a wide range of policies and standards that govern practice, certification, and licensure, arts therapies educators—whose work exists in academic institutions where the “logics of elimination, capital accumulation, and dispossession are reconstituted”—hold considerable responsibility for addressing the social learning and reproduction of knowledge that bolsters harmful practices within arts therapies culture (Grande, 2018, p. 47). Harm is reproduced through the exclusionary/inclusionary admission criteria and processes that recenter dominant norms, traditional assessment, and evaluation standards that attempt to assimilate minority students to dominant music therapy culture, and to depoliticize perspectives that suppress the culturally sustaining, liberatory function of arts processes that would deepen BIPOC service recipient communities access to freedom (Norris, 2020). Our story-telling, organizing, calls for accountability, theorizing, and world-making center a radical need to transform our relationship to power-laden systems deeply committed to keeping “us” out and institutions incapable of affirming our full humanity or showing us love (Kelley, 2008). While our disclosures can be neatly repackaged within current debates of already overburdened arts therapies curricula or situated within questions of reform versus revolution, they no less speak to the overwhelming burden students currently face and the anti-oppressive commitments that have not been actualized within arts therapies education. And so, like generations before, and in solidarity with arts therapy students of color who continue to call for progress (Johnson et al., 2021), we demand places that affirm the meanings of our subjectivity, and our representations within arts therapies contexts.

Leah Gipson and Anna Hiscox

Amaral’s question to conference participants in 2018 continues to resonate with the Black Lives Matter movement and renewed calls for justice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her petition is relevant to mental health professions as magnified trauma and loss worsen existing inequities. There has been a lack of allied efforts across the arts therapies to transparently and systematically assess racial diversity in student enrollment, retention, faculty hiring, scholarship, and organizational leadership. Venture’s correspondences in the AATA archives show that Joseph was a part of a community of Black art therapists who were working to critically shape the arts therapies in ways that have yet to be achieved (Cohen, 1973; Johnson et al., 2021). This Womanist Manifesto for Arts Therapies Education urges institutions to ask, “What happens when Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who resist interlocking oppression have the resources and support to lead critical arts therapies education?” We demand conditions for bold answers, ensuring that arts therapies educational institutions: