Positive impacts of making art in group

Art making is mostly known as a solitary activity, while creating with others in a protected environment, it allows the collective flow experience, where the inspiring use of art making is empowered by the group activity.

Art making in group provides the opportunity to build new identities and roles and engaging in mutually creative meaningful activity is a great chance to learn new strategies and life-approaches.

Sharing experience with other member of your community, or strangers, allows the participants to have a better understanding of their own personal experiences and opens the door to the group and individual creative process.

Artists, alongside scientists and entrepreneurs, are role models for innovation in our societies. Not surprisingly, arts education is commonly said to be a means of developing skills considered as critical for innovation: critical and creative thinking, motivation, self-confidence, and ability to communicate and cooperate effectively, but also skills in non-arts academic subjects such as mathematics, science, reading and writing.

There is a distinctive kind of creative energy generated when people work together to create art. It’s an experience that has the potential to change our perceptions of who we are and shows us how to get by with a little creative help from our friends. Individuals come together in the same space to create art individually or collectively; participants may pursue their own art making or may work toward a common goal through a group painting, mural, or other creative endeavor. Group members have to communicate, negotiate, collaborate, and compromise to come to a consensus and create something together. The curative potential of “creating together” is amplified when the stigma of the treatment environment is removed and group art making occurs in a normalizing setting that approximates the traditional art studio. Creating together in this way allows us to see that we are more similar than different, to be witnessed and valued by others, and, best of all, transcend ourselves by becoming part of a greater whole.

References:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-healing-arts/201003/cool-art-therapy-intervention-7-creating-together

http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/arts.htm