The Arts in Psychotherapy, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 195–203, 1999 Copyright © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0197-4556/99/$–see front matter

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MOURNING, MEMORY AND LIFE ITSELF: THE AIDS QUILT AND THE VIETNAM VETERANS’ MEMORIAL WALL†

MAXINE BOROWSKY JUNGE, PhD, ATR, HLM*

memorial created in the United States during the last decades of this century. Along with the Women’s Movement, the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic are, I believe, the distinguishing events of the latter half of the twentieth century. They represent two markers of what America means at this unique historical moment during the last years of the twentieth century. It is relevant to me as an art therapist to be exploring the meanings of these memorials. As I have thought about these phenomena and read about them, I have come to believe that the mourning processes expressed and enacted, and the mourning objects of individual and collective memory, can be thought of as metaphors for art therapy processes, since as with art therapy, these memorials embody our deepest sufferings and the intrinsic impulse toward creativity that exist paradoxically and simultaneously within the bounded container of the therapeutic relationship and the art processes and product (Kaufman, 1996). The art therapist provides art materials, a listening heart and mind—and a surround in which suffering can exist but be contained. Created artwork, its particular intent or direction notwithstanding, represents consciousness and unconsciousness. And it represents the creator’s reinterpretation of memory. Bounded within the edges of art materials, the concrete art product expresses safety and continuity. It speaks of continuity in the face of loss and death; it represents and stands for a life.

Introduction The purpose of this paper is to explore the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall and the AIDS Quilt as artworks which represent and reveal our deepest cultural yearnings of memory and forgetting at the end of the twentieth century. In this paper, as an art therapist, I attempt to make the connection between artistic meaning–making at the individual and personal level, as it springs from and expands into powerful societal concerns about healing. A few years ago, a student of mine at Loyola Marymount University, Valerie Covert, chose as her thesis research project the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial and, in particular, the artifacts left at the wall (Covert, 1996). As the wife of a Vietnam veteran, Valerie is informed and passionate about the treatment of returning Vietnam era veterans to a country that disdained them as people, who for the first time in America’s history, had lost a war. While not well known, artwork and other articles of remembrance are left by visitors to the Wall. These “offerings” (more than 40,000 items to date) are collected by the National Park Service, taken to a secret warehouse, catalogued and stored. As I accompanied Valerie through her thesis exploration, I became fascinated that people felt called to create and bring their own offerings to the dead. (We have observed this phenomenon again, with the offerings left after Princess Diana’s death). The AIDS Quilt is another central

* Maxine Borowsky Junge is a Professor in the Department of Marital and Family Therapy (Clinical Art Therapy) at Loyola Marymount University, 7900 Loyola Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90045-8217. † A different version of this paper was presented at the American Art Therapy Association Meetings, Milwaukee, WI, November 12–16, 1997. 195

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MAXINE BOROWSKY JUNGE Review of the Art Therapy Literature

While much art therapy literature has dealt with loss, grief and trauma, (Johnson, 1987) these studies seem to fall into two major categories. First are the individual or group case histories of clients undergoing grief from loss, trauma or post-traumatic stress syndrome who through their involvement in art therapy with a sensitive art therapist (often in a workshop setting) are able to alleviate suffering and lift depression (Anand & Anand, 1997; Case, 1987; Kornreich, 1993; McIntyre, 1990; Speert, 1992; Stronach-Buschel, 1990; Zambelli, Clark, & de Jong Hodgson, 1994; Zambelli, Clark, & Heegaard, 1989). The second category is art therapy literature on trauma at the societal level (Berkowitz, 1990; Felber, 1993; Golub, 1985; Jones, 1997; McDougall, 1992; Roje, 1994; Sherebrin, 1991). Berkowitz (1990) wrote about art therapy treatment with returning veterans of the Vietnam war. Golub (1985) felt that art therapy was a natural form of expression for “the devastating anguish surrounding visual memories. . . because there are no words to describe such extreme situations” (p. 286). In 1991, in “Art Therapy in a War Zone,” Sherebrin (1991) describes her work with Israeli children whose homes had been destroyed in SCUD missile attacks during the Gulf War. Her goals were the externalization of anger through artmaking and the decrease of fearfulness. Felber (1993) described art therapy in Tijuana, Mexico, after the floods, as a way to ease people’s psychological trauma. Her study concerned an art therapy group with mental health workers on the front lines after the tragedy. McDougall (1992) worked with children who survived the Andover, KS, tornado, and Roje (1994) wrote about art therapy with children after the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake. Jones (1997) discussed art therapy with Oklahoma City bombing survivors. Franklin (1993) described the AIDS crisis and its art imagery. He persuasively argued the connection between AIDS art and its social context. A third category of literature emerging is the art therapy response to urban violence. A precursor of this ilk was published by Landgarten, Tasem, Junge, and Watson (1978) in “Art Therapy as a Modality for Crisis Intervention” in which a team did art therapy sessions in a public school after the Symbionese Liberation Army’s kidnapping of Patti Hearst and the burning of people and houses in their neighborhood in Los Angeles. Virshup, Riley, and Shepherd (1993) wrote of art therapy after the Los Angeles civil unrest.

My own writing in these areas has taken me from family clinical work into the social arena. In 1985, I published “The Book about Daddy Dying: A Preventive Art Therapy Technique to Help a Family Deal with the Death of a Family Member” (Junge, 1985). With two case studies, I described the making of a book in which all the family participates and which gives expression and concreteness to the dead person as, still, part of the family. In 1989, in Social Applications of the Arts (Ault, Barlow, Junge, & Moon, 1989), I wrote of the “sweeping power of the arts for change.” The Art Therapist as Social Activist (Junge, Alvarez, Kellogg, & Volker, 1993) describes a clinical project in which art therapists worked with Nicaraguan refugees. An important paper that is relevant to my work is Kaufman’s (1996) “Art in Boxes: An Exploration of Meanings.” Here, through artmaking, a talented art therapist explores the relationship of art and suffering. The research was based on the loss of Kaufman’s child to AIDS. Through the making of a sculpture, the author confronted her own sense of loss and separateness and transformed it through art and meaning. Kaufman’s work is very close to the exploration of meaning in this paper of the Vietnam Veteran’s Wall and the AIDS Quilt: she sees art as a response to suffering and a container for feelings. She establishes art as having the potential to memorialize and transform. History and Origin of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial and the AIDS Quilt After World War I, allied forces determined that every fallen soldier should be commemorated individually. Major architects of the time put names on regulation-sized gravestones, or incised them on a monument. In 1924, Sir Edward Luyten constructed arches at Thiepval in France containing 73,367 names to memorialize those who had died at the battle of the Somme. On the Menen gate which leads out of Ypres in northwest Belgium, there are 54,896 names. (The history of the memorials has been culled from a variety of sources including Hawkins, 1993; Ruskin, Herron, & Zemke, 1988; Sturken, 1997; The NAMES Project, 1996.) Maya Lin, a Chinese-American, who grew up in Athens, OH, and was an undergraduate architecture student at Yale, was fascinated with these monuments commemorating the ordinary lives of soldiers. As a senior design student, together with each member of

MOURNING, MEMORY AND LIFE ITSELF her senior design seminar, she submitted a design in 1980 to the Vietnam Veterans competition—a design shaped by her study of World War I cemeteries. A Vietnam veteran, Jan Scruggs initiated the design competition through grassroots efforts to build “a memorial to all the guys who served in Vietnam,” (Scruggs, in Hawkins, 1993, p. 753). Criteria for designs were that the future monument be nonpolitical and that it include all who were killed or missing in action from 1959 to 1975. An eminent jury of eight art experts judged the submissions. Lin designed a simple V-shaped panel with roughly 58,000 names inscribed in 140 panels. The names, themselves, she decided, would be the memorial. Lin’s design contrasted with and functions in opposition to the established methods of remembrance on the Mall in Washington, DC, where the Vietnam Memorial would be placed. Previous memorials were of white marble and included towering shapes, such as the neighboring Lincoln Memorial and Washington monument. Lin’s wall of names was a minimalist sculpture, an earthwork cut into the sloping earth. The Wall is made of highly polished black granite which, in effect, acts as a mirror. Here the living can see themselves superimposed upon the names of the dead. The names on the Wall are represented chronologically instead of alphabetically, like a Greek epic, representing the chronicle of the war. Although the jury unanimously selected Lin’s design, a firestorm of controversy was ignited. The focus on the controversy, at first, was on the modernist character of the monument itself. But when Lin’s identity became known, she was not only young (21) and uncredentialed, she was Chinese-American and female. She was defined, not as American, but as “other.” “The selection of someone with ‘marginal’ cultural status as the primary interpreter of a controversial war inevitably complicated matters.” Her design was characterized as passive, as having both a female and an Asian aesthetic” (Sturken, 1997, p. 54). Lin’s refusal to glorify war led her to an aesthetic statement of pacifism. However, her design also reflects the war’s violence as the Wall cuts into the earth. Lin said “I wanted to work with the land and not dominate it. I had an impulse to cut open the earth . . . an initial violence that in time would heal. The grass would grow back but the cut would remain” (Lin in Sturken, 1997, p. 54). Later, a more traditional monument depicting soldiers was added to the Mall area and recently a monument to women of the Vietnam War has been established. Both face the Wall.

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What was unexpected was the stream of reverent visitors filing past the black granite wall, often in tears. Soon after the dedication of the Memorial, the controversy fell away attesting to the power of the Wall. Hawkins (1993) writes: People scrutinize the panels looking for names familiar to them, unable to refrain from touching what they read, and they leave behind them (at the base of the walls or wedged into a seam) flowers, letters, women’s underpants, teddy bears, model cars, photographs [even a Harley Davidson motorcycle]. Lin believed that the names, themselves, would be the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, requiring no embellishment. What she did not take into account was that mourners would try to give to these names the keepsakes of identity as if to restore to the dead the intimate worlds they had lost. (p. 755) Like Jan Scruggs, Cleve Jones’ motivation to name names, in his innovation of the AIDS Quilt, was the threat to oblivion of another lost generation, like the Vietnam veterans returning to an America intent on forgetting. In November 1985 it was announced that the AIDS death toll in San Francisco was 1,000. It occurred to Jones that if that many corpses were laid out in a field, people would notice the loss. As it was, “with death hidden behind closed doors . . . we could all die without anyone really knowing” (Jones, 1988, p. 3). At the annual march in San Francisco, held in honor of slain gay politician Harvey Milk, Jones asked participants to make signs with the names of someone they knew who had died of AIDS. The signs were hung on the facade of the federal building where they provided a stunning “wall of memory that, simply by naming names, exposed both private loss and public indifference” (Hawkins, 1993, p. 756). Jones recalled a patchwork quilt handed down in his family. As American folk art, quilts represent not only family but America itself. In our national consciousness, they are connected to nineteenth century sewing bees and a longing for past community, as a symbol of collective, national unity. In 1987, Cleve Jones made the first panel for what was to be called the NAMES Project Quilt: “In memory of his best friend, he spraypainted the boldly stenciled name of Marvin Feldman on a white sheet that measured three feet by six feet, the size of a grave” (Hawkins, 1993, p. 757). Since then, families and friends of those who have died and sometimes the dying person himself or herself meet to

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create a panel to contribute to the Quilt. At times, someone sewed a panel for a person they had never known. Since 1987, 40,000 39 3 69 panels bearing 70,000 names, have been sewn into the Quilt and the AIDS Quilt has become the largest ongoing community arts project in America. In October of 1996, the Quilt equal in size to 54 football fields was shown in its entirety on the National Mall in Washington. Among the visitors were President and Ms. Clinton and Vice President and Ms. Gore. This marked the first time in 11 years and the Quilt’s display in Washington five times that a U.S. President or Vice President had visited a Quilt display. Other Presidents had turned away, even left town, in their refusal to acknowledge the national tragedy represented by the Quilt. The Quilt on the Washington Mall displays “a new vision of a graveyard—a national cemetery for those who have died of AIDS” (Hawkins, 1995, p. 13). Naming Hawkins (1993) writes: Human beings are alone in imagining their own deaths. They are also unique in their need to remember the dead and to keep on imagining them. Central to this act of memory is the name of the deceased, that familiar formula of identity by which a person seems to live on after life itself is over . . . So that the voice may not fail, the names are written down. (p. 753) To name is to draw a boundary around something or someone—to accent individuality, separateness, even within the crowd. The names of the AIDS Quilt and the Vietnam Memorial counter the anonymity of lives lost of these marginalized people. Here, names express private, personal loss and public indifference. Each time the Quilt is displayed, the names are read. The power of the Wall is due to the 58,196 names inscribed on it as a roll call of the dead. The names were read out loud at the dedication ceremony of the Wall and on its 10th anniversary. The Wall’s design creates spaces in which visitors are invited to touch the names and to see themselves mirrored among the names. In the context of AIDS, naming is connected to a potentially huge risk. In the early days of the illness (and unfortunately, still today) there was stigma and anonymity. The acknowledgment that one had the

disease might mean the loss of medical coverage, one’s job, and/or family and friends. Naming was often equivalent to coming out of the closet—“an act of both defiance and affirmation . . . a stand against discriminatory practices and an assertion of one’s identity” (Sturken, 1997, p. 159). A gay psychiatrist friend, also an AIDS doctor and painter, and I have talked about the impact of hiding of self-image and the development of personality. Telling the lie and hiding behind the mask, the person feels increased loneliness, isolation and self-hatred. A recent article by Pert, Dreber and Ruff (1998) describes research which convincingly correlates the stress of secrecy and being “in the closet” of gay men with a negative course of their HIV infection. The AIDS Quilt is called “The NAMES Project.” The name represents everything and it represents nothing. It illustrates remembering as a political act. While the AIDS Quilt includes many panels for those dead who were not gay, it remains thought of as a largely gay representation. Naming provides relief through telling a history that has been taboo. It embodies the act of bearing witness. The Wall and the Quilt produce a collective body count. When the Quilt is shown in the Mall, it symbolically includes those typically cast out of America— homosexuals, drug users and the poor. Naming in both memorials is the act of inclusion of the plurality—many different individual threads. In their ethnic diversity, some have seen the names on the Wall as representative the diversity of America itself. Making Quilt Panels and the Artifacts Left at the Wall The Vietnam Veterans’ Wall of names memorializes the dead from a war that many consider lost, or at least, not won but a war that is over. The panels of the AIDS Quilt reflect a war still ongoing, a disease that thus far we cannot cure. The Wall’s names mourn the dead. The AIDS Quilt panels personalize and memorialize individual lives lived. This difference may explain why so many artifacts of personal and individual memory and loss are left at the Wall: the need to offer intimate memory objects representing a particular life fill the names with individual meaning. The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial is the only site in Washington where artifacts are left. Brought to the Wall are such things as photos, letters, poems, teddy bears, dog tags, combat boots and helmets, MIA/ POW bracelets, clothes, medals of honor, headbands,

MOURNING, MEMORY AND LIFE ITSELF beer cans, plaques, crosses and playing cards. They were originally classified as “Lost and Found.” Later, the Park Service realized that they had been left intentionally and began to save them. The Wall is a place to speak to the dead and where, by implication, the dead are present. Many letters left are addressed to the dead and often reflect the lives the dead were unable to live. Sturken (1997) describes how in an act of catharsis a well-worn watch . . . was accompanied by a note explaining that it was being left for a friend who was always asking what time it was and who died wearing it. A Vietcong wedding ring was accompanied by a note reading “I have carried this ring for 18 years and it’s time for me to lay it down. This boy is not my enemy any longer.” (p. 78) Artifacts left are symbols of loss, anger, guilt and redemption. They often thank those who “died for us,” or offer apologies to the dead. The ritual of leaving something behind may provide a transformative process where the long process of healing can begin. The majority of objects are left at the Wall anonymously. The Park Service, by collecting, cataloging and treating them as precious, transforms them from individual artifacts to aesthetic objects of memory; these objects bear witness to pain and suffering. The manager of the Vietnam Memorial archive writes:

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gether for the making of the quilt panel (Sturken, 1997, p. 186). Each panel reflects the question, “How can this person be remembered?” The only criteria for the panel are that it be 39 3 69, the size of a grave and that it bear the name of the person to be remembered. Otherwise, there is no control of form or content, no necessity for skill in design or execution. Kitsch, humor and high camp coexist with expressions of rage and sentiment. Playwright Paul Rudnick speaks of the value of humor and comedy in confronting the horror of the epidemic. Susan Seligson writes, “Dr. KublerRoss, you forgot a stage: Somewhere between rage and acceptance lies hysteria” (Seligson in Hawkins, 1995, p. 12). Fuchs states: There is extraordinary artistry here, and also a carnival of tackiness. Perhaps that is the most moving and at the same time most politically suggestive thing about the quilt: the lived tackiness, the refusal of so many thousands of quilters to solemnize their losses under the aesthetics of mourning. (Fuchs in Sturken, 1997, p. 193) Hawkins (1995) notes that: [In the Quilt there is] the freedom to remember the deceased as they were known; to look at death and whatever may lie beyond it without benefit of clergy; to tell the complex story of how we live now, person by person. The growing dimensions of the Quilt and the fact that it can barely be contained or even experienced all at once reminds us of all we have lost. But the individual panels show what the AIDS epidemic has been powerless to destroy: quirkiness, sensuality, humor, the bonds of relationship, the value of private life, love. (p. 15)

These are no longer objects at the Wall. They are communications, icons, possessing a subculture of underpinning emotion. They are the products of culture in all its complexities. . . With each object, we are in the presence of a work of art of individual contemplations. The thing itself does not overwhelm our attention since these are objects that are common and expendable. At the Wall they have become unique and irreplaceable and yes, mysterious. (quoted in Sturken, 1997, p. 79)

Many panels bear witness to the details of a life. Many function as testimony, quite simply, that this person was here. An example is a panel for James Meade. Text surrounds the quilted image of a man under a quilt next to a window:

The NAMES Project of the AIDS Quilt does not restrict the number of panels that can be made for one person. Some panels are made by strangers. Some people with AIDS make their own panels before they die. Often, in the making of a panel, “a community of concern,” is formed that did not exist before when friends, lovers, family, even strangers may come to-

—Dawn at the window— birds singing—the cats crying to be fed—lingering dreams—the light in the tree limbs—shaving—putting on a bathrobe—the smell of coffee—ironing a shirt—picking out a tie—waking up Harry— feeding the cats—the warmth of a toaster— oatmeal with raisins— cleaning the sink—making

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the bed—packing a lunch—remembering a song—riding a bus—the weight of a pocketwatch—telling a joke—listening to Mozart— coworkers complaining and laughing—the breeze in the grass— bringing flowers to Harry— chow mein and fortune cookies— brushing the cats—four-handed Mozart—folding the wash—watching an old movie on TV—the moon and the fog— drowsing in the armchair— the cleanness of clean sheets—reading in bed— evening prayer—stars and sleeping— dreaming. (Sturken, 1997, pp. 190 –191) The family quilt implies warmth, comfort, continuity and a past. It is linked to nineteenth century sewing bees and a nostalgia for a feeling of community which, as critic Daniel Harris (1997) writes, may never have existed, especially for gays. In the nineteenth century, when women had little public voice and could not vote, quilting bees were community meetings. Susan B. Anthony made her first speech on women’s suffrage at such a gathering. Communal, family quilting promises a future in which the quilt can be handed down even though AIDS indicates a breakage in the expected life cycle in which children outlive their parents. Many parents have buried their children with AIDS. Art therapist, Anna Belle Kaufman, whose son Zack, having been given a tainted blood transfusion at birth, died of AIDS at age 5, tells this story of Zack’s panel for the Quilt: I don’t remember how I found out about making the Quilt. I think someone called to tell me that it would be at UCLA and new panels would be included there. I wanted to have it made for that ceremony in 1988. I invited two friends with young children to help. We all did our parts, mostly separately and then put it together. My sister had sent Zack a kite for Christmas, but he died before he received it. I thought of a kite being up in the sky. I painted sky and clouds and included his actual handprints in the clouds. I made his imprint in the sky. Zack’s passion was trains, so I knew I had to have trains. I drew a track all around the edge and included the stuffed trains made by one of my friends for the panel. The train track represents infinity, in that it has no beginning and no end, but simply keeps going.

The name “Zack” is his signature, in his handwriting. (I felt the panel should have his handwriting on it.) In my handwriting, I added dates. I wanted people to know it was a child. [For the UCLA ceremony] Zack’s father and I brought the panel into a workshop where we put them together to make a square. There was a panel in the group for another child, a baby. We later met the parents of the baby. For the ceremony in UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, the families with new panels unfolded the squares. Then the lights went out. They thought it was sabotage. They sent us home and we came back the next night for the ceremony. During the ceremony, everybody was weeping. But it felt like a community embrace, expressing the pain and knowing you are not alone. Because we scattered Zack’s ashes, the Quilt is the only place I have to go where I know he is. (Anna Belle Kaufman, personal communication, November 7 and 9, 1997) In the Face of Death, the Impulse Toward Creativity The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial and the AIDS Quilt depend upon the presence of the image. In Quilt panels created for the dead and in the individual objects left at the Wall, creativity in the face of death and numbing grief are expressed. Sturken (1997) writes, “the image, it would seem, remains the most compelling of memory objects” (p. 11). The Quilt has no permanent home, but travels, and can be said to embody within it a location, a site of memory. The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in the nation’s capital is the location of American memory of this war. This creativity evoked in the presence of the dead, is the remarkable attempt not only to remember the dead as a process of remembering and marking the meaning of their lives but to create something from that loss. For an interesting story of the making of a quilt panel within the context of art therapy see Kerewsky’s (1997) “The AIDS Memorial Quilt: Personal and Therapeutic Uses.” The desire to express and share personal experiences plays a central role in the creation of the image as a representation of memory and of meaning. When they create, mourners are making ritual memory objects to bring to the dead. For both the Quilt and the Wall, personal mementos of a life are sewn into pan-

MOURNING, MEMORY AND LIFE ITSELF els and brought to the Wall. Through their impulse to create, mourners give meaning to their own lives. The act of creation in the face of death is a compelling act of connection between the community of mourners and the community of the dead. Scarry states, “The making of an artifact is a social act, for the object (whether an artwork or instead an object of everyday use) is intended as something that will both enter into and elicit human responsiveness” (Scarry in Sturken, 1997, p. 198). Panel making for the Quilt and the selection of artifacts for the Wall are both cathartic and painful. They provide an intense confrontation with grief for mourners and a deeply profound creativity that can help the artist/mourner begin to heal. As the panel is finished and sewn into the Quilt, as the intimate object is left at the Wall, a psychic mourning process continues, of hypercathecting, detaching, connecting and letting go. And some form of preliminary closure can be expressed. Mourning and Memory: Conversations with the Dead Memory forms the fabric of human life, affecting everything from the ability to perform simple everyday tasks to the recognition of the Self. Memory establishes life’s continuity. It gives meaning to the present as each moment is constituted by the past. As the means by which we remember who we are, memory provides the very core of identity. (Sturken, 1997, p. 1) Even as the memory debates rage in mental health today, we must acknowledge both the fragility and the endurance of memory. As with art therapy, memory is articulated through the processes of representation—in the image. The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial and the AIDS Quilt are unusual memory objects in that they depict two shared national tragedies of the late twentieth century, representing two markers of what America is at this particular point in history. The Wall and the Quilt are the forms that memory takes. Both create a community of shared loss—a unique kind of community in the waning years of the twentieth century. The AIDS Quilt and the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall create sites of memory. The memorials offer the opportunity for an outpouring of loss and grief about traumas that have not been previously sanctioned. Their message is that memory has pur-

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pose. To remember is to give consolation to the living. In these instances, to remember has been to transform public opinion in a country intent on forgetting returning veterans and focused on making invisible what is perceived to be a gay disease. Both memorials, have “made an assault on official oblivion” (Hawkins, 1993, p. 777). They express the value of making intimate reality public. Author Milan Kundera states, “Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life” (quoted in Sturken, 1997, p. 7). The Wall and the Quilt have prevented us from engaging in the death of forgetting. When we visit and revisit these memorials which represent vast cemeteries of the lost we reopen our grief once again—we open the wound so that it may bleed freely to blend with our tears, to perhaps eventually heal, although we may bear some scars forever. This process of mourning is at once transformative and rehabilitative. A wife of a Vietnam veteran said, “If my husband has something on his mind to sort out . . . he’ll go to the wall. He doesn’t care if it’s 2 a.m., raining or below zero . . . There is something about the wall—it’s like a magnet (quoted in Sturken, 1997, p. 65). Through the ritual of remembrance, the Quilt and the Wall have become places to visit memories, to have a conversation with the dead. But the Wall and the Quilt are as much about survival and about life itself, as they are about mourning. The transformative and rehabilitative process of mourning—the ability to return to life—are enacted through the creativity of the Quilt panels and through the intimate and ritualized memory objects left at the Wall. These memory objects have many conflicting interpretations and are often ultimately mysterious in meaning. But within the process of mourning, people participate in giving meaning to the past and the present. “The enactment of traumatic memory is important as a healing device and as a tool for redemption” (Sturken, 1997, p. 17). Memories are created and are a form of interpretation. The Quilt and the Wall as forms of collective remembering contribute to what Sturken defines as “cultural memory,” or “memory that is shared outside the avenue of formal historical discourse” (Sturken, 1997, p. 3): . . . Cultural memory is a means through which definitions of the nation and ‘Americaness’ are simultaneously established, questioned and refigured . . . for example, the Quilt laid out in the Mall evokes a sense of America, yet it also

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represents those who have been symbolically excluded from America. (p. 13) The Quilt and the Wall are about a personal cultural memory, not about generalization. Through them, individuals create cultural memory. The AIDS epidemic and the Vietnam war produced new stories and radical resistance. These stories confront and interrupt the dominant historic narratives of the United States, those of science and technology, masculinity and American imperialism. The contested histories, of the Vietnam war and the AIDS epidemic are still fluid and formative and, still contested. They demand unique forms of commemoration to give presence and voice for mourning, for memory. The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial and the AIDS Quilt are these unique forms. Sturken (1997) argues for cultural memory as an “inventive social practice” and not a representation of truth. She writes: We must rethink culture’s valorization of memory as the equivalent of experience. If memory is redefined as a social and individual practice that integrates elements of remembrance, fantasy, and invention, then it can shift from the problematic role of standing for the truth to a new role as an active, engaging practice of creating meaning . . . [It can be] a process of engaging with the past rather than a means [of calling] . . . it up, [and] we will come to understand its role in enabling individuals to imbue the past with value in the present. (p. 259) Conclusions The lessons for art therapists from the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall and its artifacts and the AIDS Quilt are many. They focus on the inclusion of disenfranchized and marginalized people, and they remind us of the importance of the ritual of creativity. Creativity in the face of death offers a spectrum of life-enhancing possibilities. These possibilities can ward off a meaningless conclusion to a life, give meaning and hope to a life lived and to a future in which the dead, through memory, still exist. In the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall artifacts and the Quilt panels, creativity is not simply about remembering the dead. It is an effort to create something from that loss. The power of the created memory

image remains a talisman and a touchstone. It is both a symbolized ritualistic process and an art product inherently full of meaning. Its power lies in its ability to portray a life. The art image reminds us of the personal complexities of a human life beyond a surface. Further implications for practice are cultural and systemic. The individual art therapist must recognize that she and her clients are bound to a cultural moment. They are part of it, and structured by it. It lives in them and is inescapable. Paradoxically, the culture also changes minute-to-minute. The old mental health treatment notions of “adaptation to culture” no longer hold. They have not been effective for a long time now. The art therapist must reconfigure herself to become a change agent whose materials and media are not only human life but the culture itself. She must strive to enhance and “grow” a positive environment that will not only sustain but will nurture. This comes about because of who she is, what she does in the world and what she helps her clients do. The art therapist must pay close attention to these larger community and systemic concerns. The creation of community art projects as exemplified in the Vietnam Memorial Wall artifacts and the AIDS Quilt engage people together in the remarkable power of the arts for change through the creation of meaning. For example, the Clothesline Project is one in which people, usually women, create shirts intended to portray a personal experience of violence and their transformation from the victim role to that of survivor. It is also my hope that the art therapy and creative arts therapies communities can begin to more clearly define themselves to act as arts communities with special arts skills and a special purpose: to use the arts as agents of change for a world sorely in need in the last years of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most important lesson for art therapists is about human beings yearning to be part of something bigger than themselves. Coming together with many others and leaving one’s mark on the whole is both transformative and transcendental. The process of collaboration whereby one leaves one’s imprint through the image, connects the person to the community of others who have undergone the tragic consequences of suffering. But through the creation of meaning and hope, our common bond, can continue on. In this way, the art therapist and her client become cocreators, an interconnected community, so to speak, to create an image which weaves a path through

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