KU faculty awarded AAI Arts & Humanities Grant to expand art-based aging project
LAWRENCE — The Achievement & Assessment Institute (AAI) at the University of Kansas has awarded the 2024 AAI Art & Humanities Grant to Sarah Jen, associate professor in the School of Social Welfare, and Liz Langdon, a lecturer in the Department of Visual Art, for their project, “Untold Stories of Aging in Action – Revealed and Traveled.” The project’s aim is to create and document the influence of an art-based intervention among communities of older adults and intergenerational audiences.
“Untold Stories of Aging in Action – Revealed and Traveled” was born out of a 2021 project by KU social work students seeking to illuminate the experiences of older adults and their caregivers through art and conversation. Students collected and displayed artwork from more than 30 artists that captured stories of aging, and the pieces were displayed in an exhibition hosted in the KU Commons in April 2022.
“Artists were able to use their artwork to start important conversations with their loved ones. Displaying their work also allowed them to leave a legacy, tell their stories to and be remembered by a larger audience,” Jen said.
Since then, the online digital archive of submissions from KU students and other community members has continued to grow. “Untold Stories of Aging in Action – Revealed and Traveled” will be an evolution of the original project and will bring the art collection to a wider audience through a traveling exhibition.
The pieces, ranging from poetry to sculptures, will be brought to communities of older adults where students from the KU School of Social Welfare and the visual art department will facilitate discussions about the pieces with community residents and attendees. KU art education students will be leading the art criticism portion of discussions, while the social work students will facilitate the psycho-socio-emotional meaning-making portion.
“Art is a vehicle for conversation, and we think the discussions are going to be very rich as we work in these communities,” Langdon said. “It's not all about the quality of the artwork necessarily. It's really about the process, the meaning making, and the building of connections through looking at and discussing art.”
Attendees will also be able to participate in their own interactive art creation and meaning-making process by contributing to collective art installations. Their reflections and reactions to the exhibition will be recorded and documented for future grant submissions to reproduce this creative intervention on a wider scale. A larger collection of pieces and the art installations created by older adults will also be shared at an exhibition open to the broader community at the end of the project.
“Our audience for the original exhibition was really intergenerational and reached a wide range of ages, so I am really looking forward to having specifically an older adult audience and seeing how older adults respond to the artwork,” Jen said. “I think we know more about how younger people and an intergenerational group has responded to it so far, but I'm excited about the potential of getting older adult voices out there as well and being able to share that with a wider audience.”
Jen and Langdon said that they want to provide a space for older adults to think about their next chapters, allowing them to break away from societal expectations of what late life typically looks like.
“There's a lot of research that says that when folks can imagine what they want for their futures, they're more planful in making it happen, but we don't often give older adults the experience to think of what comes next,” Jen said. “I think societally we tend to think of later life as like this one homogenous experience where once you’re 65 or older, it's all the same after that. But it can be inspiring for people who are in their 70s and 80s to think about what they still want out of their lives.”
The purpose of the AAI Arts & Humanities Grant is to foster deeper ties between the arts and humanities and the education and social sciences within which most of AAI’s work is focused. “Untold Stories of Aging in Action” bridges these two fields in a creative and resonant way that engages the community.
“We've had this dream of bringing together students from social work with students from art education for a while, and this felt like a really nice way to do that. Art brings up emotions, and it triggers things, and students in the social work field know what to do with that,” Jen said. “Art students will ask audience members to interpret and engage with the art, and then the social work students pick up that thread and ask, ‘What do you do with that? What comes next?’ So, I think those two groups of students will really balance each other well.”
Langdon said that receiving the AAI Arts & Humanities grant is encouraging in part because it shows that the arts are valued at KU.
“The joy that comes from engaging with art can be a really positive and transformational experience for people. I am excited that we will be able to make those connections and that AAI has recognized that this work is important,” Langdon said.
AAI Operating Officer Jackie Counts highlighted the project’s effects on reshaping perceptions of aging.
“This project powerfully illustrates how art can transform our understanding of aging,” Counts said. “By uniting social work and art education, Jen and Langdon’s work amplifies the diverse stories of older adults and encourages them to reimagine their futures. At AAI, we champion interdisciplinary collaborations that bridge the humanities and social sciences while fostering meaningful community connections.”
The “Untold Stories of Aging in Action – Revealed and Traveled” traveling exhibition will begin in summer 2025. More information regarding the project will be made available in the coming months.