In Museums, Those With Alzheimer’s Find Themselves Again

How art engages people with Alzheimer’s

Zeisel says that while these men and women are losing the ability to link complex thoughts and to think clearly and logically, they rely more and more on reading, understanding and communicating through emotions. One reason—their “hard-wired” abilities still work, he explains. They still have the ability to read facial expressions such as sadness, happiness, fear, disgust, suspicion, disdain and love. And these skills, learned very early in life, can short-circuit logic, even thought, to reach and retrieve long-buried memories. Indeed, observing or making art seems to enhance and take advantage of these skills.

“Alzheimer’s doesn’t take away memory,” Zeisel says. “The part of the brain that’s damaged is the part that gives a person access to that memory. But emotions can revive old memories.”

There are currently 5 million Americans with Alzheimer’s disease, and that number is expected to grow as the population ages. Many of these men and women, rich or poor, loved or abandoned, sit in their own blank world all day. Loved ones give up—why should I go see her, she doesn’t even recognize me?—and wait for a merciful end.

Even when told of the fresh approach to Alzheimer’s through art, caregivers can be skeptical.

“Oh, she couldn’t get to a museum,” says one loving son of his 96-year-old mother, pointing out her ravaged hip joints and anxiety about change. “What would be the point? She never even understands what’s happening on television.”

Awakened memories, new interactions

Zeisel has another question: “What’s the point,” he says, “of medicine keeping us alive longer if we don’t have a life worth living?” In his latest book, I’m Still Here, Zeisel maintains that the Alzheimer’s mind is a working, even creative mind. The average person, he says, has 100 billion active brain cells. A person with Alzheimer’s has 90 billion, which shows there is still a mind at work if only we can discover ways to reach it. For Zeisel, the way into the mind is through the emotions.

“Art touches and engages the brain in a more profound way than other activities,” Zeisel writes.

Although scientific research is in its infancy, decades of anecdotal evidence suggest that arts such as music and painting provide detours around dysfunctional areas of the brain.

A September article in the Lancet Neurology, a British medical journal, notes the establishment of a new institute in London—the International Centre for Research in Art Therapies at Imperial College—to “bring arts-based therapies in from the scientific cold” by conducting rigorous scientific studies.

People with Alzheimer’s are very good at expressing what they think and feel at the moment, instead of editing themselves according to others’ opinions. So they are natural artists and make a natural audience for works of art as diverse as paintings, drama and poetry, Zeisel says.
Zeisel emphasizes that any individual can provide such tours, but urges careful preparation. [See “ARTZ Tours.”]

The ARTZ tours—on days when the museums are closed to the public—are not casual visits. They are carefully orchestrated ahead of time so that participants will be at ease. ARTZ leaders study galleries and other locations for access, configuration and size. Tour leaders are trained to understand the unique skills and needs of people with dementia. They do not quiz those with Alzheimer’s about the name of the art or the artist, or ask them to compare one work with another. Questions are specific. What do you see? Why is the woman in the field?

Even the works of art are vetted ahead of time—by people with Alzheimer’s. At the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, for example, ARTZ experts selected 30 paintings they thought might be suitable and showed them to potential visitors. Based on the visitors’ reactions, the experts concluded that 10 paintings weren’t understood at all, 10 were well understood and the remaining 10 fell somewhere in the middle. After this research, ARTZ experts recommended seven of the works, including two from the middle group but none from the not-understood-at-all works.

One special painting

The most compelling painting at MOMA for the Alzheimer’s viewers? The well-loved Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth, which shows a lone woman in a field with a house in the distance. Zeisel says they immediately see that there is something special about the house. They see the woman in the field longs for the house. “She wants to get to the house. So do I,” one viewer said.

Among the MOMA paintings that confounded or did not at all engage—the huge colorful canvas Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian. Most of the people with Alzheimer’s looked at its pattern of horizontal and vertical lines and asked questions like: “Why would someone hang a tablecloth on the wall?”

At the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, an ARTZ group pondered a painting called Sunday Stroll by Robert Dickerson, in which a man and his two daughters walk together through a town looking at buildings. They come to one whose windows are all black. Why are they black, a leader asked? The ARTZ group thought they might be dirty, or that the building was unoccupied.

Finally, one woman said “Oh yes, I had the windows done in my house this morning.” Morning was just three hours before, a particularly vexing time frame for a person with Alzheimer’s who has little short-term memory. But she was right—a window-cleaning crew had been at her nursing home that morning. The painting had elicited a memory, small but in the case of this woman, loaded with content. The painting brought meaning to her life through memory of home, of being in charge, of living.

Linda Greider is a freelance writer who lives in Washington.