Ongoing
Series Explores Relationship
Between Artistic Creativity and the Brain
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago - Interrobang
Spring/Summer 1995
In her early
career as a speech therapist, Andrea Gellin Shindler discovered that after
one of her patients, Carol Frankel, suffered a stroke, she developed unprecedented
artistic abilities. "Carol's interest in painting was fascinating,"
Shindler recalls. "We discovered it during her rehabilitation therapy,
and later I began talking about the case with other people in neurology
and psychology. The more I learned, the more fascinating the subject became
to me."
This discovery
prompted Shindler to explore the relationship between neurological function
and creativity, a subject that has fascinated both the medical world and
the art world since Van Gogh. Shindler's questions brought her to the School's
Department of Art Education and Art Therapy, which resulted in the first
symposium devoted to the subject "Art and the Brain," held at
the School in 1988.
The success
of the symposium led to a second "Music and the Brain" in 1992,
and to the recent "Sports, Dance, Movement and the Brain," held
at the School this last April, which explored the relationship between movement
(dance, sports, mime, and acting) and brain function. All three symposia
have brought together scholars, educators, and artists from all over the
world to stimulate interdisciplinary research and learning, from fields
as diverse as neu-roscience, education, art, speech pathology, developmental
psychology, sports, and cultural anthropology.
Shindler's
interest in the subject has resulted in the Foundation for Human Potential,
a not-for-profit organization she formed in 1990 to explore issues concerning
creativity and learning. The basis for Shindler's research and the symposia
is the widely-acclaimed book Frames of Mind The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
by Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Both Shindler
and the School hope to continue this ongoing exploration in future symposia.
|