What do you do when one of your program goals is to help diminish social isolation through creativity and collaboration and then your city declares a social lockdown?

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), we were three visits into Create+Collaborate, a 10-session printmaking class for older adults, when we got the call that all art programs were suspended and the museum was closing temporarily to protect our communities from COVID-19. At first we wallowed in the irony, waited for curves to flatten and art classes to start up again. And then we called all our students, the most vulnerable to the virus. “How are you doing?” “Do you have access to the internet?” “Oh! On what device…?”

Nine of the fifteen original students were game to take the challenge and try printmaking from their kitchen tables via videoconferencing. We sent them detailed instructions on how to join Zoom from their smartphones, tablets, and laptops. They called their adult children to borrow computers. There were students who got bullied by log-ins and meeting ID’s but Pattie Esquivel, the senior program coordinator, always found a secret backdoor. Everyone proved their perseverance and ability to learn new technologies.

Teaching artist Marianne Sadowski started each class with a warm welcome and a round-robin check-in. Participants shared anger with our rudderless president. They shared the loss of loved ones and fear of getting sick themselves. They shared sadness that birthdays with grandchildren were socially distant and without hugs. But they also listened deeply to one another, rallied around each other, and gave tips for better Zoom angles and lighting. Everyone proved their empathy and ability to make new connections, even online.

Art stores weren’t considered essential businesses at the beginning of the pandemic. So printmaking kits were ordered from Blick, which sadly sat in transit purgatory for weeks! Marianne adapted her lesson plans to accommodate a printmaking class void of brayers and inks and linoleum blocks. Students looked around their houses to find unexpected art materials. One woman experimented with items from her kitchen—rolling blackberries dipped in food coloring across her pages. We begged our boss to let us on the locked-down museum campus to raid our art studio! Marianne and Pattie, masked and well supplied with Purell and Google maps, drove all over Los Angeles delivering paper, cutters, inks, and soft cut linoleum blocks! Everyone proved their resourcefulness and ability to innovate in the face of challenges.

Carolyn shares her fruit prints. Photo Credit: Karen Satzman

What do you do when another program goal is to collaborate and your co-creatives are on social lockdown? You make a pandemic-themed book! The students’ prints, writings, and experimentations were accumulated and bound (bookbinding, another new skill they learned) to reveal their collective creativity. Twelve brilliant, beautiful, and heartfelt books titled The Utility of What is Not – Reflections from Quarantine are to show for it. No surprise, but everyone proved their generosity and ability to collaborate—together yet apart.

Students created the collaborative book The Utility of What is Not – Reflections from Quarantine. Photo Credit: Karen Satzman

Create+Collaborate was launched in 2017 and every single class demonstrated that older adults have the ability to learn new skills, experiment and take risks, learn from and help others, and discover the ways in which creativity can uplift your spirit. There was a uniqueness, however, to this class that we didn’t see when we were together in the studio. Outside of class time students emailed each other encouraging words, recommended books and artists, shared their vulnerabilities, and cared for each other. As Marianne stated in the book’s dedication, “Moving quickly to an online world, we found a different way to connect, some ways deeper and more open. Together we moved to explore how the pandemic’s dark reality also carried bright hope.” And, as one student commented in the post-class survey, “The regular class has many benefits, but during the pandemic, the online class was a lifesaver.”

Written by Karen Satzman, Director, Youth & Family Programs, Los Angeles County Museum of Art