Harriet Claire Wadeson (January 9, 1931, to January 26, 2016)

It is difficult to write about Harriet, not because there is too little to say about her, but because there is so much. A fortunate person, she was talented at everything she did, from writing (poems, novels, and plays, as well as articles, chapters, and textbooks) to teaching (courses and presentations in the United States and around the world) to creating and running training programs (from Texas to Chicago to Evanston, Illinois). Harriet's multiple skills not only served her well, they also benefited the field of art therapy.

Her American Art Therapy Association (AATA) Honorary Life Member acceptance speech in 1992 had the same title as a film made by a friend—“The Happy Accident”—and likened her career to creating art:

My most joyous moments in creating art are happy accidents—running paint or an unintended smudge—that change the direction of the work. My career in art therapy has that same sort of feel—meeting Hanna Kwiatkowska at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) 30 years ago and asking her what art therapy was. And when she told me, then asking, “How can I get training?” “I'll train you,” she replied, and so I began 13 years of work at NIH that afforded me many “happy accidents.” (Wadeson, 1993, p. 11)

She commented in a similar way on the profession:

My hope is that we look long and hard at the steps we are about to take so that as we continue to evolve as a profession, we will become the art therapists we want to be. The artist in us maximizes the “happy accident.” She or he also recognizes the unwanted smudge. The nature of our special creativity in art therapy is the art of synthesis. We work whole cloth, a human life, a community, our culture. We run amuck when we forget to be whole and split ourselves into factions, artists or therapists, licensed professionals adhering to training standards, or freer healers, and so forth. We understand that a work of art is more than the sum of its parts. It is a creative synthesis of form and content, line and shape, color and texture. I hope a model of artistic synthesis can serve us as we continue to create ourselves as art therapists and to mold the shape of whom we will become. I believe that we who are so creative in our art, in our work with our clients, in our development of training, in the many accomplishments of our extraordinary professional association, will continue to maximize the possibilities for the creative growth of art therapy … . For me, it is a deeply moving moment to be honored by you, my art therapy sisters and brothers, and it is with deep appreciation that I recognize you as my professional family, a group of people for whom I feel great admiration and affection. Thank you for honoring me. Thank you for constituting a wonderful profession that has added immeasurably to my life. With all its ups and downs, good times and bad, AATA has felt like family. Art therapy has felt like home. (Wadeson, 1993, pp. 12–13)

In addition to being mentored by Hanna Kwiatkowska, originator of family art therapy, Harriet also learned a great deal from her many clinical colleagues about being a therapist. Always curious, she also learned about research in an environment that valued it and that allowed her to design her own studies, as well as to collaborate with others, mainly psychiatrists. She produced an exhibit, Portraits of Suicide, that won the Benjamin Rush Bronze Medal Award at the American Psychiatric Association conference in May of 1971, and was also part of the National Institute of Mental Health's 25th Anniversary Commemoration that same year. Figure 1 is a photograph of her with her exhibit.

Figure 1. Harriet Wadeson and Her Exhibit, Portraits of Suicide, 1971

Because Harriet was very curious, she loved learning. She published research papers with her psychiatric colleagues when she had only a BA, but after leaving the NIH she sought further training, obtaining two master's degrees—an MA in Art Therapy and Psychology from Goddard College in 1975, and an MSW from Catholic University in 1976. In 1978 she earned a PhD from Union Institute in Psychology and Art Therapy. Her doctoral dissertation became her first book, Art Psychotherapy (Wadeson, 1980).

A talented writer, Harriet contributed significantly to the art therapy literature. In 1987 in The Dynamics of Art Psychotherapy, she focused on elements, phases, and context. She then edited a book with two colleagues, Advances in Art Therapy (Wadeson, Perach, & Durkin, 1989), which contained fascinating chapters in sections devoted to new methods, new populations, and art therapy training. In Art Therapy Practice (Wadeson, 2000) she offered what one reviewer termed a “smorgasbord of current art therapy practice.” Drawing on the work of her students, she described art therapy with children, adolescents, and adults, as well as “art therapy projects.” In 2010 she revised her first book, Art Psychotherapy.

Service to AATA

Harriet was involved in AATA from the start, initially on the Research Committee (1970–1983), winning AATA's first prize for research. Between 1987 and 1989 she served as Research Chair, editing A Guide to Conducting Art Therapy Research, published by AATA in 1992, at a time when most art therapists had no training or experience in research and the profession needed to legitimize the still-young field.

Harriet had joined the AATA Executive Board earlier as Publications Chair, serving in this capacity from 1983 to 1987. At that time Board members chaired committees, so as the Newsletter Editor she functioned “like the conductor of AATA's communication train” (Wadeson, 2006, p. 98). And, because AATA had just decided to start its own journal after a long period of “affiliation” with the American Journal of Art Therapy, she was a member of the Journal Planning Committee and the Editor Search Committee. Soliciting contributions, she wrote a letter to art therapists in 1983:

It is with great enthusiasm and excitement that the American Art Therapy Association is launching its own professional journal in 1983, Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association. In addition to scholarly articles, the journal will serve as a forum for perspectives on current issues of interest to the profession. This section has been tentatively titled Viewpoints and will include discussion of professional, social, political, ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical communications. (Wadeson, 2003a, p. 170)

When she became Associate Editor of Art Therapy in 2003, she quoted her 1983 letter of invitation and added: “I would like to return to this original vision and encourage you to contribute your ideas so that Viewpoints will provide a stimulating dialog of perspectives within the field” (p. 170).

I knew that Harriet loved to write and that she was talented, but when I went to the journal archives for her articles I was astonished. What was impressive was not only the sheer volume of her prose, but also the poetry of her titles: “A Question of Creativity: Paradigms—Facilitators or Inhibitors?” (Wadeson, 1985); “My Stars, We Need Art Therapy” (Wadeson, 1986b); “The Fantasy of Art Therapy Enters the Mainstream” (Wadeson, 1986a); “Through the Looking Glass: I. When Clients’ Tragic Images Illuminate the Therapist's Dark Side” (Wadeson, 1990); “Diving and Snorkeling; the Depths and Shallows of Therapy” (Wadeson, 1994); “Wrestling the Hydra, or Can an Art Therapist Find Aesthetic Fulfillment in the Marketplace?” (Wadeson, 1996); and “A Swan Song of Sorts” (Wadeson, 2003b). And Harriet didn't just write articles and books; she also wrote plays and poetry. She reminisced about producing an opening session at AATA:

Certainly, one of the highlights of AATA conferences for me was the 25th anniversary celebration in Chicago, for which Sandra Graves (now Alcorn) and I put together a multi-media opening called “The Phantoms of the AATA.” We showed historic old slides taken by Aina Nucho, and I rewrote the lyrics from The Phantom of the Opera, which my students sang and played on the piano and violin. (Wadeson, 2006, p. 98)

Art Therapy Educator

As an educator, Harriet directed a graduate art therapy program at the University of Houston in Clear Lake from 1978 to1980. This was followed by 23 years at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), a position from which she retired in 2003. When I visited her program in 1983, I was impressed with the quality of the students and the combination of seriousness and inventiveness in the teaching. One of UIC's most unusual enterprises was an Annual Summer Institute, held on the wooded shores of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. There Harriet was able to invite guest faculty and open the institute to students from all over the United States and the world. Having had the pleasure of teaching there, being in a gorgeous environment was itself both pleasurable and stimulating.

At her death, Harriet had been an art therapist for over 50 years. Although officially “retired” from UIC, she continued to write, to present, and to initiate a new postgraduate certificate program at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, for professionals from related fields. As she wrote in her chapter in Architects of Art Therapy, a book she co-edited with Maxine Junge in 2006,

Sometimes people question whether I am really retired, but I think retirement is a state of mind [emphasis added]. It is no coincidence that Northwestern is only five minutes from my home, whereas UIC is an hour away. Retirement is doing what I want, when I want [emphasis added]. (Wadeson, 2006, p. 102)

Free Spirit and World Traveler

Harriet was a free spirit; at age 56 she took up karate, was quite pleased with her ability to master it, and made it to brown belt (one notch below black, the highest level) before stopping at age 65. At another point she engaged in street theater, and later, in a community arts project—the Hockey/Art Alliance, helping previously hostile competitive groups of teenage hockey players to forge empathic relationships by creating buildings using carved wood pieces and glue (decorated with colored tissue paper and tiles) that were then combined to form a city (Wadeson & Wirtz, 2005).

She had an endless appetite for travel, venturing abroad to teach long before it was common among art therapists and leading delegations of art therapists and others to learn from healers in other cultures such as China, Indonesia, and Bali. She was exceptionally open-minded, rejecting nothing, exploring everything.

Courage, Cancer, and Creativity

In her chapter in Architects of Art Therapy, she was as always extremely candid about her childhood, her adolescence, her marriages, and her children—Lisa, Eric and Keith Sinrod—and her grandchildren—Amanda and Michaela Sinrod—as well as describing her evolution as an art therapist (Wadeson, 2006). This candor is also reflected in the film The Happy Accident: The Life and Work of Harriet Wadeson (Schwartz & Whitaker, 2003); however, as with all lives, hers did not end when the film or the book was finished. Her journal writing and her art served her well when she was faced with a health crisis.

The following is from a newspaper interview by Nancy Maes in the Chicago Tribune (December 22, 2015, Life & Style/Health Section):

Q: When you were diagnosed with stage 3 uterine cancer about six years ago, you did artwork and kept a journal published in “Journaling Cancer in Words and Images, Caught in the Clutches of the Crab … ” (Wadeson, 2011); you thought your experience might help others and give them hope. How did the writing and art help you?

A: [Harriet] The artwork I did was an altered book. I took a regular published book and changed the pages. I had an image of a black hole that I had fallen into, so I painted a black hole on a page, and I cut a hole through a number of pages of the book, and I did collages in it of photos and of images of what I imagined I would do when I was well. It took me out of the misery of the cancer, and I would have something that pleased me—not because it was great art but because it expressed something I was feeling. The writing was a chronicle, which was less creative, but later it helped me remember the experience.

Harriet beat the uterine cancer and presented often about her creation of the book. Ironically, after moving to a retirement community with her partner Dr. Neena Schwartz (2010; see their portrait in Figure 2), she eventually developed leukemia, caused by the successful treatment of the cancer. Harriet then received regular transfusions at Evanston Cancer Center. According to her friend Claire Whitaker, “She was full of life through this struggle … writing plays that she then directed and acted in, always painting … . [There is] one with the gold leaf lady [that] is one of her last …  done 2 weeks before her death” (C. Whitaker, personal communication, February 10, 2016). It was quite moving to see this incredible piece that she created shortly before she died.

Figure 2. Harriet Wadeson and Neena Schwartz

Harriet was multimodal, expressing herself fluently in drama, movement, and art, as well as in poetry. Her last poem is an eloquent statement on facing death:

Darkness

Black is not the darkest color

Darker are the tears that will not come

The pain that will not cease

The shrunken world is shadowed

In the dreary chambers of confinement.

Dark is the day

Darker than the night

With its random dreams of some other life

The bright future has faded

Into the paled expectations

Of tomorrows dark as today,

A life that teeters on the edge

Of an unknown black hole

From which it will never emerge.