Military Needs Art Therapy

Can Programs That Help the Military Save the Federal Arts Agencies?

By GRAHAM BOWLEY
MARCH 27, 2017

Masks designed by veterans in a program run partly by the National Endowment for the Arts at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Credit Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

BETHESDA, Md. — First they paint. Later, they write stories or express their emotions by playing the drums or piano.

Finally, the military service members who participate in arts therapy at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center here create a “culminating project,” a montage of shapes and words.

“This gives them a visual voice,” said Melissa Walker, one of the therapists for the Creative Forces program run by the National Endowment for the Arts in conjunction with the military.

On Tuesday, the endowment will announce that the program, in place at seven locations around the country, will expand to four more.

Endowment officials describe the expansion, which has been planned for nearly two years, as a valuable enhancement to a program that has shown good results with service members and veterans. They say there is no connection between the timing of the announcement and the need to rally support for the federal agency as President Trump threatens to eliminate it completely.

But the growth of its programs that benefit members of the military and veterans has also helped the agency build support among some Republicans and rebut criticism that it is an elitist, left-leaning repository of woolly-headed indulgence.

“People understand we owe a deep obligation to our veterans,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who advised John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. “It is political poison to take anything away from them. I can’t speak as to why they have done the program, but there is no question, because politicians and the public are so reluctant to take anything away from vets, it would be wise to talk about the art therapy for veterans.”
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Capt. Walter M. Greenhalgh, director of the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, and Melissa S. Walker, a creative arts therapist, at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Credit Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

All one has to do is review the extent to which President Trump spoke of veterans issues while on the stump to understand the potency of an issue like whether the nation provides adequate care for its servicemen and women. Now, with the fate of the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the hands of the Republican lawmakers controlling Congress, supporters of the endowments say mentioning the work they do with the military and veterans is important when lobbying lawmakers.

“It definitely resonates with Congress, as it should,” said Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, an advocacy group.

At the medical center here, though, the focus is on getting better, not getting votes. Arts therapy patients have all suffered a traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder. Organizers say the monthlong program helps them cope with haunting memories, disabilities and the future.

“A lot of this population has trouble verbalizing what they have been through,” Ms. Walker said.

The focus at first is on painting masks, each treated as a blank slate that helps a patient explore wounds and identity. Masks line walls and a paint-spattered table in the bright therapy room. Some are fractured, others macabre, a few peaceful.

“I was kind of lost,” Chris Stowe, a retired Marine who studied oil painting and learned how to play the ukulele in the program, said in a telephone interview.

After deployments including Iraq and Afghanistan, he suffered night terrors and insomnia, he said. “I found this wonderful thing that is art.”

Rusty Noesner, a former member of the Navy SEALs, was injured in Afghanistan. “You are going 100 miles per hour, and after serving you are slamming on the brakes,” he said by telephone. “The artistic process gives you a pause to start thinking about how you should be living your life now.”

Walter M. Greenhalgh, a Navy captain who is director of the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, which hosts the program at Walter Reed, said the patients are often surprised by how much it helps them in “externalizing those inner demons.”

The extent of N.E.A. programs with some military affiliation has grown since the Vietnam era, when the endowment provided a $1,980 grant to support an exhibition at West Point. Last year it gave out 25 direct military-related grants worth $499,000, and funded Creative Forces at an additional cost of $2.3 million.

The endowment stresses that its expansion in this area since the 1990s, when conservative critics assailed it as elitist and irrelevant, is not some political strategy, but rather part of an effort to “increase access to the arts for all Americans.” The agency says the same broad mission underlies its decision to fund a range of projects in every congressional district.

The efforts have not persuaded some conservatives, though, who suggest the same kind of art therapy programs for the military can be provided by private nonprofit organizations and that some already are. “N.E.A.’s involvement in programs for members of the military, by themselves, do not justify the agency’s existence,” said Romina Boccia, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Creative Forces will expand to Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee border; the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Fla; Fort Carson near Colorado Springs, Colo.; and the Naval Special Warfare Command in Virginia Beach, Va.

The N.E.H. programs for veterans or service personnel include the Warrior Chorus, in which veterans perform classical texts and their own writing. The program has received $650,000 from the agency since 2014, including another $300,000 being announced this week.
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James Becton, center left, in “Our Trojan War,” at the McCullough Theater at the University of Texas in Austin. It was staged as part of the Warrior Chorus program for veterans, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Credit Richard Termine

One of its productions, “Our Trojan War,” was staged last week in Austin, Tex., in a run that is due at BAM Fisher in Brooklyn in April.

Marco Reininger, who served in Afghanistan, took part in an earlier production, of Sophocles’ play “Philoctetes.” “Seeing, through the play, how little had changed about the reality of armed conflict and the experience of the humans tasked with executing it pulled me in very deeply,” he said. “The warriors and citizens of ancient Greece had the same questions and carried the same trauma as soldiers do today.”

The fate of projects like the Warrior Chorus is likely to be determined in key congressional appropriations committees as they consider whether the two endowments should be funded, and at what level. In the past, lawmakers have cited the military and veterans’ programs when justifying budget increases for the endowments, which now each receive roughly $148 million.

Many committee members have not said whether they will support the agencies. But at least one, Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican who is chairwoman of the appropriations panel that oversees the endowments, has backed them.

In explaining her support, she spoke of the N.E.A.’s work in her district, including the arts therapy work, which she fought to extend and is being carried out at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in her own state.

“I have consistently supported funding for the arts and humanities and have seen the direct benefits of these programs in communities across Alaska,” Senator Murkowski said in a statement. She cited the program at the Alaskan base, which “treats our wounded warriors.”

Jack Begg contributed reporting from New York.