EngAGE art teacher Colette Brown and her students at LBSAC got some nice press recently on Gazettes.com, “Long Beach’s Favorite Community Website.” From the article:
Colette Brown, a 25-year-old researcher and artist, leads a ceramics class at Long Beach Senior Arts Colony. She teaches students — whose average age is 77 — as a part of the colony’s EngAGE program, a nonprofit that provides various workshops, classes and learning opportunities to senior citizens.
Participants shape, fire and create ceramic art pieces and objects, but may also, however, be performing a special form of brain exercise. To further explore this concept, Brown is currently leading a research project called The Mind is Muscle, a three-month art workshop for which Brown recruited a number of senior citizens, many from her ceramics class.
[We posted previously about “The Mind is a Muscle Project,” which was a 12-week workshop for seniors that aimed to protect brain health and stave off dementia. In the workshop, seniors learned about the neuroscience of brain plasticity and explored the multiple facets of communication and idea-making. “Connections” was the name of the resulting art show at LBSAC.]
Read the full Gazettes.com article here, and take a look at Colette’s TED Talk: How Art May Alter the Face of Dementia.
~ Helene Weinberg, Program Director
