From EngAGE C.O.O. Dr. Maureen Kellen-Taylor:
Artist SLATER BARRON is putting her work at the service of the community, once again!
Slater has served as Arts Advisor to EngAGE at the Long Beach Senior Arts Colony and brought the wealth of experience from her 80+ years to benefit the seniors residing there.
She recently read that there are 5 million people in the U.S. suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), and that funding for research is a fraction of that for other major diseases (see footnote). Slater is intensely determined to publicize this dismaying fact and she is urging people to do something about it!
A most feared disease, AD haunts us as we age and as we notice facts, faces and names that we knew very well escaping us when we need them.
Slater knows what it is like for the 15.5 million friends and family members who are affected by AD, because both her parents suffered from it. She watched her mother change over 15 years from the first signs in her mid-70s until she died.
Slater is currently collaborating with another Artist-Advisor, Kimberley Hocking, who runs the Greenly Art Space, Signal Hill, Long Beach CA. They are preparing an installation of Slater’s work about the experience of Alzheimer’s patients and in particular Slater’s mother. It opens on February 21st and there will also be materials available from both the Alzheimers Association and the Creative Caregiving project of the National Centers for Creative Aging.
This is not her first art exploration into AD. In 2007 Slater wrote and published a book called Remembering the Forgetting because she wanted to tell her parents’ love story and for them to be remembered for all they were and not just who they became because of the illness in the last years of their lives.
She has also previously exhibited several installations, such as “The Six O’Clock News” at Loyola Marymount University Art Gallery, where she had the satisfaction of knowing it could be seen by passers-by through the large gallery window.
Slater Barron is an impassioned woman, a gifted assemblage artist (popularly known as The Lint Lady), a mentor to many artists, and friend to even more. She has, as she says, always been unusual! At an earlier showing Slater donned her sequins and with top hat, cane, and tap shoes, performed in front of a piece called “Fly Pie “. She believes “if you can’t look at life in unusual ways it would be unbearable”.
Sad to say, she will not be dancing at the Greenly opening, but those visitors meet her and see the work and deepen their understanding both of Alzheimer’s Disease and how art can bring grace to even a frightening subject.
“My Mother’s Garden 2” will open at Greenly Art Space, 2698 Junipero Serra Ave., Unit 113, Signal Hill (Long Beach) on February 21st 2015 at 6pm.
We hope the experience of this powerful and evocative work, as well as the information from the Alzheimers Society and the Creative Caregiving Project, will inspire you to write to your political representatives and request much more funding for Alzheimers Disease. Slater Barron will be writing to California Senators Boxer and Feinstein herself.
Learn more about the artist and see more of her art on her website at slaterbarron.com.
Footnote:
Compare the National Institute of Health spending on research –
Cancer = 6 billion dollars (6,000,000,000)
Heart Disease = 4 billion dollars (4,000,000,000)
HIV/AIDS = 3 billion dollars (3,000,000,000)
Alzheimers Disease = 480 million dollars!! (480,000,000)
