Start Your Own Art Program for Older Adults

Written from an artist's point of view, "How to Facilitate Art for Older Adults" is a practical guide on how to take your art facilitation ideas into the real world. In this e-book, you will learn how to set up an art cart, how to contract out your art facilitation services, and what working within a limited budget might look like.

Shelley Klammer is a registered therapist and an expressive arts educator with the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association. Shelley worked in Artworks Studio at George Derby Centre in Burnaby, BC for 9 years collaborating with a team of 8 artists and art therapists, maintaining a large working art studio that provided projects in painting, textiles, weaving to seniors with varying levels of dementia and physical challenges.

Shelley has developed and facilitated many therapeutic art programs over the years to various populations. Her intuitive group approach is grounded in the direct experience of engaging many types of people in the art-making process. Shelley has developed art programs for incarcerated youth, adults with acquired brain injuries, people with developmental disabilities, seniors with Alzheimer’s and dementia, as well as children and the general public.

A Proven Program for Older Artists With or Without Dementia

Beyond therapy and theory, this e-book provides examples of what kinds of art projects have practically worked in care homes and community art programs for the elderly in Canada. This practical 89-page e-book takes you inside of Canada's largest art studio for the elderly and shares the surprising findings of what is artistically possible for older artists.

Generously illustrated with 75+ photos that detail the wide variety of art projects, you will be surprised at the creative depth and physical and emotional stamina that is possible near the end of life. The e-book details the pros and cons of offering art projects that are structured and instructor assisted, as well as the benefits and detriments of offering spontaneous art projects that are more art therapy inspired.

This e-book offers ideas on how to engage cognitively well elder adults, as well as those with dementia in art-making activities. Creativity and dementia is often such an inspiring mix. When the cognition of self-censorship fades, the creative expressions that result are original, enlivening and delightfully surprising!

An Artist with Dementia

"An angry and troubled man, he would frequently switch gears from anger to inspiration and say the most profoundly poetic things when he painted. On one day he would be grouchy, and on another day he became enchanted with the visual world. Regularly, a look of pure inspiration would appear in his eyes. As he painted, he would gaze out the window and exclaim at the colour of the sky, the turn of a tree branch or the shape of a cloud. He would then say, “The sky is off-blue with a whiff of snow.”