Hands to heART: Art Therapy and Voices of Cancer

As second-year graduate students from LMU’s Art Therapy program, we are excited to introduce the focus of our Master’s research project, a concept we coined as exhibition as intervention. Our goal is to create a space that brings awareness to the possibilities of exhibition to amplify the voice and increase empathy between artist and viewer. Originally, our vision was to hold the exhibition at Cedars-Sinai to supplement the 2020 Art Therapy Research Symposium. With COVID-19 placing restrictions on public gatherings, the exhibition had to transform from a physical experience to a virtual one. The catalog which began as our secondary focus to the exhibition, shifted to become the primary source of communicating our intentions. Informed by the literature of our research, we felt a catalog best collected and organized the data, which in this case was the artwork submitted. It is our great privilege to present this catalog with the works of artists engaging in the creative process to make meaning of their experiences with cancer.