The Healing Power of Art

by Liz Goldner

August 24, 2024

A number of art exhibitions in the past few years have exhibited the work of women who have employed artmaking to reinvent their lives and overcome the emotional, physical, social, and environmental abuse they have long endured. These artists have transformed that abuse into soul-stirring work that inspires us to embrace our own creativity. Perhaps these divisive times are prompting art venues to present exhibitions detailing these artists’ stories. And with the campaign of a hope-filled female Presidential candidate now in the air, these artists’ messages are more relevant than ever.

Alice Neel, “Ian and Mary,” 1971, oil on canvas, 46 x 50”. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.

While many of these artists are alive today, the deceased speak to us through their work about their efforts to overcome their travails. Alice Neel (1900-1984) mined her personal difficulties, including periodic poverty, rejections by male partners, the loss of two children, a nervous breakdown, and persistent sexism to create an impressive body of work. Reflective of her life experiences, she fashioned a 70-year career embracing social justice, civil rights and LGBTQ issues.

Neel’s many poignant portraits from the 1960s and ‘70s of counterculture people and those of color recall a time when positive social change was beginning to take place. A portrait such as “Ian and Mary” (1971), depicting an interracial couple, displays a casual, hippie-like pose, with arms and fingers knotted. “The Fugs” (1966) were a three-member rock band known for its opposition to the Vietnam War (more than once burning an American flag onstage) and droll commentary on the sexual revolution. “Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd” (1970) features a confrontational trans Warhol superstar sitting with a more subdued friend. These and many more of Neel’s portraits display a generous acceptance of people often living on the margins of society, as she herself did for the better part of her life and career.

Niki de Saint Phalle loading a rifle in front of “Homage to Facteur Cheval,” a wall-mounted assemblage from 1962.

Courtesy of Niki Charitable Art Foundation.

Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) came from a yet more devastating background. Her parents were wealthy and had residences in both Paris and New York. They were strict Catholics who were also emotionally and sexually abusive of their daughter. Like Neel, de Saint Phalle was treated in a mental hospital, where the self-taught artist made her first artworks. Some of her earliest pieces, which she titled “Tirs,” were riddled with bullet holes. Standing in front of live audiences, she shot large white canvases hung with jars of paint, ink, yogurt and other liquids, which “bled” upon impact. These cathartic events, by her account, enabled her to cast off the pain in her heart. She was also railing against the patriarchy that had subdued her as a child and that tried to suppress the work of her early adulthood. De Saint Phalle cured herself of her early trauma through artmaking, moving beyond the “Tirs” to create the joyous “Nanas” sculptures, which she worked on for the rest of her life. These colorful, resin-coated larger-than-life women, displayed internationally, conjure up joy and empowerment. The “Nanas” represented, for de Saint Phalle as well as those of us who admire them, an emotional and even psychic transformation.

Rebecca Campbell, “Salt Palace,” 2005, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

Rebecca Campbell (b. 1970) was 16 years old when she was told by Mormon elders that she shouldn’t go to college because doing so would make her unhappy. Those denigrating words, spoken in a severely patriarchal world where men were presumably granted supernatural powers by God, became the catalyst for exploration through her paintings of her early childhood and of feminine power. Campbell ultimately did go to college and graduate school and now teaches art. She expresses her emotional metamorphosis and personal empowerment in her artwork, which she exhibits regularly in gallery and museum exhibitions. The large oil “Salt Palace” (2005) depicts her teenage self, standing on the deck of her Salt Lake City home, her back to the viewer, confronting a powerful man who represents her father. The painting presents a female persona, specifically that of a budding artist, so large that she becomes the work’s driving force. Campbell embraces her inner child via the act of painting, and through it transcends the fate forced on her by the elders that she finally rejected.

Yael Bertana, still from “Malka Germania,” 2021, three-channel video, 40 minutes.

Courtesy of the artist and the Jewish Museum of Berlin.

Filmmaker Yael Bertana (b. 1970), an Israeli native who moved to Berlin to escape her country’s political climate, grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. She produced a film — a kind of fever dream — about those visions in 2021. Her 40-minute three-channel video, “Malka Germania,” translating from the Hebrew as Queen Germania, references both personal and collective trauma about war and subjugation. The elegant, androgynous Malka, wearing a long, hooded robe, moves slowly throughout Berlin, past the Brandenburg Gate, Israeli Defense Forces, beautiful female dancers, Hitler Youth in training, an organ grinder, and a man blowing into a shofar.

Throughout the film, young Orthodox Jews walk through the city, replacing German street signs with Hebrew ones, re-creating Berlin as part of the Jewish Diaspora. These scenes are juxtaposed with those of alarmed residents tossing Nazi memorabilia from apartment windows. The concluding scenes feature an image of an imperial Nazi “Hall of the People” rising from a lake, followed by hordes of German citizens walking warily along the railroad tracks, finally leaving Berlin as Malka looks on approvingly. Since her childhood in Israel, Bertana has carried the pain of her lifelong awareness of the Holocaust. By erasing Germany’s devastating past,in the capital city of Berlin, through her art, she neutralizes her memories of one of history’s most heinous crimes.

vanessa german, “Can I Love You Without Capitalism? How?”, 2019, mixed media assemblage, 59 x 67 1/2 x 26”.

Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York.

An August 10, 2024 New York Times article, “For a ‘Citizen Artist,’ Creativity Is a Matter of Survival,” relates the story of vanessa german (b. 1976), who believes “that art can restore our capacities to love ourselves and our communities — but only after we confront traumas and injustices, past and present, that stand in the way of such care.” The formerly homeless artist blurs the boundaries between art, magic, spirituality, and knowledge in her work and in the art courses she teaches. Believing that creativity is a form of survival, she has developed an extraordinary body of work, using found objects, gems, and beads to address pain, grief and healing, with references to her African ancestry. Perhaps most important is her belief that creativity can heal not only the artist, but the community around her as well. She has reached out to members of her community, including children, to join in her artmaking. Born three quarters of a century after Alice Neel, german’s creative ability to embrace community in her work is similar to Neel’s and an intrinsic part of her personal and collective healing.

These and many other artists who have the courage to mine deep pain and trauma through aesthetic means in effect expand creativity into a personal healing that can be transformative. The five discussed here demonstrate that, at its best, art transcends the personal experience of the artist to inspire both a high-level aesthetic experience even as it enhances our own healing.

Liz Goldner is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009. 

Liz Goldner’s Website