Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry, and Healing

This book contributes to a larger global call to radically re-create ourselves―to transform our fear and alienation from art, Nature, and ourselves. With compassion and grace, the co-authors outline how everyone may access the gift of Spontaneous Creation-Making and change dominant narratives of individualism. Discovering interconnectivity through art-care we can dream courageously together into the unknown possibilities of a precarious future.

Art-care, as coined by the co-authors, is a matrixial form of communicaring through art and reverence. This theoretically informed and practice-based book bridges the individual with the communal in Creation-centred ways that interweave the many parts with the whole. It provides examples of teachings, practices and spontaneous creations of makers that will benefit those who want to integrate art-care into individual practices or group facilitation. This book benefits socially engaged artists, arts-based researchers, artist-philosophers, activists, students, teachers, organizers, therapists, caregivers, and more.

Barbara Bickel is a ritual-centred artist, researcher, teacher and Emerita Faculty of Art Education, Southern Illinois University and co-artistic director of Studio M*: A Collaborative Research Creation Lab Intersecting Arts, Culture & Healing.

R. Michael Fisher is a visual-performative artist, researcher, teacher and education consultant, and director of In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute and co-artistic director of Studio M*: A Collaborative Research Creation Lab Intersecting Arts, Culture & Healing.