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You are at:Home»Community»Seniors»Seniors Use Ancient Art of Mask-Making as Healing Tool

Seniors Use Ancient Art of Mask-Making as Healing Tool

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By on March 11, 2020 Seniors

Ben Teller never thought of himself as an artist. In fact, he didn’t think he had a creative bone in his body.

But the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Spirit of Survival: The Ancient Art of Mask-Making workshop not only helped unleash Teller’s artistic abilities, it also provided him with a way to process his emotions as he battles cancer.

Teller (pictured above) was among 10 seniors who unveiled their deeply personal works at a February 27 reception held at the Center’s Pride Hall in the Anita May Rosenstein Campus. The group had worked on their masks during an eight-week workshop funded with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

His mask was inspired by the Hindu goddess Kali who was called upon to fight a demon who, when his blood dripped and made contact with the ground during battle, created clones of himself until there was an army.

“Kali was called upon to vanquish the demon, and she did,” Teller explained to the more than 40 guests at the unveiling. “She managed to cut off his head and drink his blood before it hit the ground. To me, that seemed like a metaphor for cancer. The cancer cells are also duplicating themselves throughout my body, and I am fighting it and hope that I will win.”

The workshop was organized through the Center’s Senior Services and facilitated by mask maker Nick Paul and Anne Stockwell, the founder of Well Again which helps survivors take back their lives after cancer.

“We wanted to give a small group of people the opportunity to get together in a safe space,” explained Stockwell, a three-time cancer survivor. “As we told our stories, we just worked on these masks. Sometimes when you start to work on masks, a strange thing happens – it starts to tell you things about yourself. I think this exercise and this journey turns out to be meaningful in ways that we don’t necessarily expect.”

Paul (pictured, above) is also a cancer survivor and unveiled three radiation masks he had made. He explained: “When I got diagnosed with cancer, I loved the mask they put on me and asked, ‘Can I keep it?’ I was more concerned with the art of making a mask than with the cancer diagnosis.”

But, he added in a more serious tone: “We all wear the mask of the lone wolf when we deal with diagnosis. We watch the others from a safe distance down below and only run with them when we feel safe. Only the wolves from our diagnosis know what we’re going through.”

Participant Hermina Ban’s wife has been battling cancer for more than two years. Being a caregiver, patient advocate, and cheerleader “has been really stressful and just really heavy,” she said.

“I wanted my mask to be something that would counteract that that heaviness,” Ban shared with the crowd. “The image of a jester came to me, and it resonated with me. My family always tried to turn to comedy and humor to bridge the gap between people and make people feel warm and friendly. The jester represents entertainment and comedy and humor.”

The eye-catching mask made by participant David Joseph (pictured, above) was covered in colorful feathers representing feathers of a bird. He found himself working through his traumatic past during the workshop.

“Like a bird, I flew away from the situation I was in, and I ended up in Los Angeles,” Joseph shared. “He was from an affluent Republican family, and I was miserable living a lie and being a people pleaser. I have a real good life today.”

When the workshop was first offered at the Center two years ago, it was geared for people who were impacted with chronic illness. This time it was expanded to anyone dealing with grief.

“When something enormous and dreadful happens in your life, it’s bigger than you are,” Stockwell explained. “In order to regain your balance and move on, your job is to become bigger than it is. And the way to achieve that is to turn it through pictures and words—whatever is at your disposal—into a story you can tell. Art therapy turns out to be a way to bypass all your logic and help you to get to the place where you really were hurt and it brings up surprising things.”

Learn more about the Center’s Seniors Services, including upcoming activities and workshops, at lalgbtcenter.org/seniors.

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“The Los Angeles LGBT Center keeps me together” – @gottmik 

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Images by @mcfaddenphoto
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She also withstood condemnation throughout her career from the NAACP, who took issue with the stereotypical roles she inhabited. In response, McDaniel reportedly said, “I can be a maid for $7 a week, or I can play a maid for $700 a week.”
 
Meanwhile, McDaniel used her fame and influence to fight against racial discrimination off screen. When she moved to the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1941, white residents filed a lawsuit against her and other Black homeowners, aiming to oust them from their homes on the grounds that property deeds forbade sales to Black homeowners. McDaniel led the fight against the attack, and a judge eventually ruled that the racial restrictions were unconstitutional, paving the way for the end of such restrictions nationwide (and leading to the Fair Housing Act). 

McDaniel’s home has been preserved as a historic monument, and those in Los Angeles can still visit the site to this day at W 22nd St. and S Harvard Blvd. (Stay tuned for more updates like this throughout the month!)
 
Image Credit: Criterion
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One of our lesson plans is about The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB)—named after the lesbian poetry collection “The Songs of Bilitis.” DOB is believed to be the first lesbian rights group in the United States. Founded in San Francisco in 1955 by a diverse group of women (and later carried on by the couple Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon), DOB originated as a social club but quickly changed its focus to education and advocacy. Daring to embrace their sexuality in a time of relentless persecution and opposition, DOB brought women together to fight for acceptance in a culture that deemed homosexuality as deviant and abnormal.

In 1956, the group began publishing The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian magazine in the country. Aiming to provide an outlet for voices that had long been silenced, The Ladder included news, poetry, short stories, and essays relating to the lesbian experience, as well as updates on DOB meetings and activities. 

The Ladder encouraged readers to “come out of hiding,” offering employment advice and distributing a pamphlet titled “Your Legal Rights.” DOB continued to meet and publish new issues of The Ladder into the 1970s, connecting women across the country and giving rise to dozens of other lesbian and feminist organizations nationwide. Thanks to Internet Archive, we curated some of our favorite covers of The Ladder for your viewing—you can see how the tone and messaging evolves as the LGBTQ+ movement more firmly takes hold over the decades.

We’ll be posting more throughout the month, so stay tuned for other updates like this. (And if you don’t want to miss a beat from the Center, you can always turn those post notifications on. We promise we won’t spam ya!)
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