Posted Friday September 08 2017 at 10:36 pm
Join us September 22, 2017 at the Worcester Art Museum for a day-long symposium exploring the role that the arts can play in helping people with acquired brain injury cope with trauma, regain mental function, and reorient their lives.
Presented by VSA Massachusetts an affiliate of Seven Hills Foundation in association with The Institute for Arts and Health, Lesley University, and Boston Arts Consortium for Health (BACH).
The backdrop for the symposium will be an exhibition of artwork by Jon Sarkin, an artist whose story of emerging from a brain injury with a new and remarkable capacity for visual art is chronicled in the book Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph. Jon will share his experience in a multi-media performance.
Speakers will explore the contribution art making and art therapy can make to healing brain trauma. Ronald E. Hirschberg, M.D. of Harvard Medical School will share his work on the music-brain interface and neurologic music therapy.
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Posted Monday August 28 2017 at 3:38 pm
Tiger - by Lauren Geraghty
It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of our friend and colleague Lauren Geraghty. Lauren shared her remarkable artwork at the Open Door Gallery on several occasions and served as a member of the gallery committee. She was a devoted supporter of our work and a committed advocate for artists with disabilities.
Visit the archive of her most recent show at the Open Door Gallery.
Read Lauren's obituary.
Lauren will be greatly missed.
Posted Tuesday July 18 2017 at 11:05 pm
A message from Charles Washburn:
When Maida Abrams, founder of VSA Massachusetts, approached me about joining her team over thirty years ago, I thought I would help her build her organization for a while and then move on. I really had no idea that I was signing on to an international movement that would become my career. Now the time has come for me to move on, I will retire in November. Correspondingly, I am happy to announce that Nicole Agois has agreed to accept a new position at the Seven Hills Foundation, as Managing Director of VSA Massachusetts.
Unlike when I started, Nicole already knows VSA intimately and has demonstrated her passion for this work. Her first exposure to VSA came as a volunteer at the Ann Sullivan Center, the VSA Affiliate in Lima, Peru. After her studies at the Boston Conservatory and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, we were lucky to recruit Nicole onto our team, moving throughout the organization over the past thirteen years as her leadership and the organization matured together. She is also well known in the VSA Network, sharing field-leading knowledge and application of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), teaching artist development, and school partnerships. Last year she served on the City of Boston's Leadership Council surrounding the creation of our sector-wide cultural planning process. Needless-to-say, she is an exceptional artist, practitioner and leader whom we are deeply lucky to have assuming this essential role.
Nicole's team will include Marian Taylor Brown, who worked with us as an intern while she was in Harvard's Arts in Education Program, as a COOL Teaching Artist, and has also exhibited in the Open Door Gallery. Marian will serve as Organizational Consultant through a special arrangement with the Institute for Community Inclusion and UMass Boston, where she is a doctoral candidate in Global Inclusion & Social Development.
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