Collaborative Grief Books: Sharing Our Experiences of Loss Through Art

The idea for collaborative grief books popped into my head a year ago, a year after my Dad passed away. My thought was that I would use 8 old books, do art on a page influenced by my grief and give or mail it to someone I know who has suffered loss too. After one year of incubation, I have prepared 8 books to send out. I did art on the first page of each book and will give it to a friend to complete a page. After they do art on a page, they will pass it to a friend, and so on until the entire book is filled with the artistic expressions of friends of friends. I have asked that each person who receives the book write their name and where they live on the list corresponding to the page of the book they completed. This project was a culmination of many things: my art therapy training, art education techniques I learned in school, a collaborative book art project a college friend shared on Facebook, and a collaborative art project that I designed for an art show over twenty years ago!

I had the privilege of training to be an art therapist at UNM in the late 1980's when they offered an Archetypal Art Therapy Master's degree. Howard McConeghey was an inspiring teacher who beamed with excitement when he shared the teachings of Carl Jung, James Hillman, and Joseph Campbell. He entranced us with the story of how he met Picasso in Paris as a soldier. We learned to recognize the archetypes in everyday lives and connect personal stories to universal myths. As I went through the grief process of my Dad's death, I started to feel a part of something larger with each stage I experienced, and recognized that while it was very personal, it was also similar to many stories of loss I knew through my education and experience. After a year of experiencing his death with family and on my own, I wanted to be connected to others through art who had also suffered the loss of a loved one.

The Art Therapy program I attended was housed in the Art Education Department, so I received a solid foundation in Art Ed training and technique. One of the projects that I loved was a collaborative project where 12 of us students produced a section of Picasso's Mother and Child painting. The 2" square section of a xerox copy of the art work was reproduced by each of us onto a 3 - foot square piece of paper. We put all of our individual paintings in place and created a 12' x 9' painting which hung in the stairwell. I wish I had taken a picture of it hanging there. The color, style and scale were imperfect and yet it worked as a whole!

Twenty years ago, I designed a drawing for a collaborative work that I would hang in an art show for Art Therapy Alumni. (Photo above) The drawing was a circle of friends holding hands around a heart. I divided and cut the drawing into nine sections, then I sent them to friends. When the art came, back I reassembled it. It was exciting to receive the art work back in the mail! And satisfying when the art puzzle came together!

A few years back, a college friend of mine shared a project on Facebook where she and her sister sent a book back and forth doing art on the pages. I have always been inspired by my friend's creative innovations. I loved how the book held their expressions and I was very inspired by the concept.

All of these experiences have led up to the collaborative grief books that I plan to send out into the world. Some of the books have 60 pages so they will travel far! I invite anyone who completes a page to share it with me in an email at culturalartexcursions@gmail.com, and I will post it to a gallery here on this website or onto my Cultural Art Excursion Facebook page! I am hoping that by completing a compiled and shared book of our expressions regarding loss and grief, we will feel part of something bigger. Hopefully this will help us heal from our losses.