“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.”

This saying takes on new meaning through Kemper Art Reaches Everyone (KARE), the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s new program that reaches out to early-to-moderate onset Alzheimer’s patients and their care partners.

The idea for the program was conceived just two days after Allison Taylor started her position as manager of education programs at the Kemper. She received a call from Lynn Hamilton, founder of Maturity and Its Muse, a local organization that promotes positive, productive aging through the arts.

Community members such as local dancer and choreographer Alice Bloch, who helped incorporate a movement component to the program, later joined the collaboration.

Washington University’s Department of Psychology has also had a hand in the project. Dr. Brian Carpenter, an associate professor of psychology whose research lab focuses mostly on older adults and dementia patients, and his undergraduate and graduate students have been involved in developing the program from its inception.

“At the beginning we were thinking about how to best structure it and how to help Allison [Taylor] and Alice [Bloch] be prepared to communicate effectively with the Alzheimer’s and dementia patients,” Carpenter said. “Dementia causes communication issues, and we wanted them to learn, as much as they could, effective strategies for communication.”

Much of the structure of the program was inspired by a similar one at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City called “Meet Me at the MoMA,” which is also intended for dementia patients.

In the last academic year, Taylor and the others conducted five pilot programs to modify KARE’s structure and gauge the interest of community members. Eventually, a two-hour program was set.

During the first hour, the group takes a tour of the gallery, looking at and discussing three or four pieces.

“What I try to do is relate the artwork to their lives and make connections between the artwork and a memory,” Taylor said. “One of the photographs [shows] people sitting around a dining room table, so I’ll ask about favorite family meals or gatherings of friends and family and what those occasions were like.”

The second hour takes place in the classroom, where the participants are given snacks and a hands-on art activity related to the pieces they’ve seen, a task similar to creating a collage or drawing.

During the two hours, Bloch also leads three or four movement activities.

Carpenter explained the therapeutic value of interactive creativity-based programs like KARE.

“On a superficial level it’s useful…because they get to get out of their house, get some exercise walking around the museum and socialize. At a deeper level, this kind of program helps people who are struggling with brain disorders to be able to connect with some of the capabilities that are still preserved even as the disease progresses,” Carpenter said.

As for the caretakers who accompany them—often relatives of the people with Alzheimer’s—the program is as much for them as it is for the patients, Taylor said.

“Sometimes care partners become very isolated and don’t get opportunities to get out and engaged,” she said. “We wanted it to be…[a chance] for them to do something cultural with the person they’re caring for, and also have some social interaction with other care partners.”

Carpenter said that the program has been valuable and educational for his students, who help out during the tour of the gallery and then have the chance to work one-on-one with the patients during the classroom section, thereby encouraging them to make art that connects to their own lives and personal experiences.

“It’s one thing to read about Alzheimer’s disease… It’s very different when you’re actually sitting there and talking with somebody who has the disease, or their caretakers,” Carpenter said. “This helps students translate their academic and scholarly reading into a more practical, real-world understanding of what it’s really like to live with Alzheimer’s.”

Fifth-year psychology graduate student Erin Sakai, who works in Carpenter’s lab and studies Alzheimer’s disease, said that hands-on experience with the patients has shed light on how the disease affects different people differently.

“You can read in a book about the symptoms that people might have, but [the disease] can sometimes be personalized and individualized,” she said. “When you’re able to work with individual people…you get to know the individual as a person beyond these symptoms and this disease that labels them and see the variability that exists.”

Taylor has been pleased with the student involvement and hopes to start an undergraduate psychology internship opportunity within the program.

KARE had its first official session on Sept. 10 with a group from the Alzheimer’s Association. Taylor recalled one particularly memorable participant, a woman who had come with her son.

“She was pretty quiet throughout the tour, but when we got into the classroom, she started drawing and seemed to be laughing more and cutting up with her son. After her son had gone to get the car, she said, ‘I have learned a new way of interacting.’ I thought that really says it all.”