Out of Abstraction

Merging Experience, Theory, and Praxis as Black Art Therapists

Authors

  • Leah Ashanti Amaral graduate alumnus of the Art Therapy & Counseling Department, School of the Art Institute, USA
  • Johanna Tesfaye graduate alumnus of the Art Therapy & Counseling Department, School of the Art Institute, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v21i1.3048

Keywords:

Black, Experiential, Art-Based Inquiry, Black Art Therapist, Art Therapy, Poetry

Abstract

This paper describes a collaborative self-reflexive practice using art-making, personal experience, womanist performance pedagogy (WPP), the Black Arts Movement, and poetry as the starting material for inquiry. Through arts-based inquiry, we reflected on our practice and Black personhood as art therapists, artists, and activists. We investigated the concepts of therapeutic and professional space in three areas: negotiating identity, co-creating our therapeutic practice, and making alternatives. We utilized the seven characteristics of WPP proposed by Khalilah Ali in her dissertation ‘For Us Poetry is Not a Luxury’: A Case Study of Six Black Women Artist-Educator-Activists as a framework, while drawing from care and healing practices from the Black Arts Movement, and using poetry as material. We merge our experience, theory, and action through this collaborative, self-reflexive, exploratory investigation, to better understand how to cultivate subversion and challenge the power structures and systems that we navigate on a daily basis. Our interest in this topic derived from the two alternative spaces that we created during our time as art therapy students: BIPOC Makespace and Sister Circle. We realized that our starting point does not always have to be in relation to whiteness, critiquing whiteness, or talking about our experiences in relation to oppression that has happened in our education. This paper is giving us the opportunity to choose our own starting point and material to investigate, putting Black knowledge, experience, and praxis at the center.

Author Biographies

Leah Ashanti Amaral, graduate alumnus of the Art Therapy & Counseling Department, School of the Art Institute, USA

Leah Amaral is a Chicago-based creative practitioner and collaborator. Amaral is a recent graduate from the Art Therapy and Counseling masters program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When pursuing her Master’s degree she understood that her position as a student was where her activism was. To address issues of equity and difference within art therapy education at a PWI, Amaral created Sister Circle in March 2019. Her work is understood from Black feminist ecological thought and womanist performance pedagogy; centering the experiences, knowledge, and stories of Black women and girls. Amaral currently works as a trauma informed clinical art therapist supporting families in reunification therapy. Amaral’s current body of work explores grief, loss, and cycles of violence through poetry, digital media, and memory as material to create an archival site as an avenue to process personal and collective experiences.

Johanna Tesfaye, graduate alumnus of the Art Therapy & Counseling Department, School of the Art Institute, USA

Johanna Tesfaye is a Chicago-based creative practitioner and collaborator. Tesfaye is currently pursuing her masters in Art Therapy and Counseling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tesfaye’s artistic, professional work, and research focuses on ‘return’, collective memory, and memory performance as care. Tesfaye works as a Northstar program coordinator and anti-oppression trainings curriculum builder & facilitator at the Chicago Freedom School. She is also serving as a board member on Y'all Rock Carbondale as part of the Girls Rock Camp Alliance, an international membership network of youth-centered arts and social justice organizations. Tesfaye is the recipient of the 2018 SAIC Belonging & Compassion Grant and was named a 2019 Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education Social Justice Scholar.

Picture of the two authors Leah Ashanti Amaral and Johanna Tesfaye

Published

2021-04-20

How to Cite

Amaral, L. A., & Tesfaye, J. (2021). Out of Abstraction: Merging Experience, Theory, and Praxis as Black Art Therapists. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 21(1). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v21i1.3048