The Arts and Collective Grieving

Collective grief is stimulated by large scale losses and tragedies, some impacting people and communities far from the initial ground zero of the event. I began putting together the material for my current book during the lock down phase of COVID when most everyone’s list of recent losses was extensive. In my dance studio turned media studio I opened my zoom window on the world and family members, students and colleagues from around the country joined me in taking the first steps in grieving –recognizing and naming individual and communal losses. In the years since, there has been no shortage of community-wide tragedies that need to be collectively grieved. Reports of mass shootings in schools, shopping malls and places of community worship or celebration flicker across our various size screens along with the images of environmental climate devastations like floods, fires, and earthquakes.

Writing The Art of Grieving: How Art and Artmaking Help Us Grieve and Live Our Best Lives was a discovery project, one begun as a writing practice blog. I looked at most everything that was unsettling, disappointing, even devastating, in our individual and communal lives through the lens of loss and the need to grieve it. The secondary emphasis to my exploration was how art done on our behalf or made by a mourner for themselves or as they companion another, can help us to grieve. Discovering these connections offered extensive examples and confirmed their powerful effect.

Healing the Culture

Art can call attention to a cultural problem or injustice in such a way that it makes an emotional impact, inspiring people to act to change the unfortunate circumstances that created it. I learned of the problem of more than one-thousand missing and murdered native women and children in North America when visiting the native American relatives of my native American granddaughter. Kyra was 9 years old at the time when she joined a friend and I as we visited an art instillation of the Red Dress Project in the desert near Palm Springs, CA. Standing in the dry dusty breeze we move our focus to the red dresses hanging on clotheslines, each dress blowing independently at various rhythms as the wind swirls around them. We experience the women’s presence, in this marking of the absence of their bodies to fill the dresses.
In the quiet, yet powerfully loud social commentary, I hear a protest and remember the wisdom of grief expert, Francis Weller. He suggests, “Part of the medicine we need right now is to come out of the fiction that grief is individual.” Or to imagine that grief ends with the generation that first experienced the loss. “If the sequestered grief that surrounds us made a sound, the whole world would be weeping.”

Art helps the healing of those impacted by horrific incidents of loss–gun violence

History and fate had put me in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania a few miles from the Tree of Life Synagogue where on 10.27. 2018, a lone gunman killed eleven worshipers and wounded six including several Holocaust survivors. In the years since I have had the opportunity to closely observe and participate in the communal rituals and art projects that the 10.27 Partnership has initiated and coordinated. I wrote about the 5th anniversary Commemoration Ceremony to honor and remember the lives lost. 

“As leaves flutter gently down from nearby trees, friends and family members share stories of their deceased loved ones before an audience of several hundred community members…Musicians play restored string instruments from the Violins of Hope, an exhibition of instruments played by Jewish musicians before and during the holocaust. The message, communicated through the rhythmic tones of the music is one we are all living: how the human spirit can overcome even the most daunting of circumstances.”

Join me and artist colleagues Sunday afternoon November 24 at 4 pm eastern time for an exploration of using the arts of dance, storytelling, music and visual arts to collectively grieve well: https://letsreimagine.org/76768/the-art-of-grieving-how-art-art-making-help-us-grieve