Harriet Claire Wadeson: Pioneer, Teacher, Colleague, and Friend

Harriet Claire Wadeson (January 9, 1931, to January 26, 2016) was my teacher, colleague, and friend. Our relationship spanned a period of 32 years, beginning when I was a graduate student and culminating in a unique role reversal during the last few years of her life. Harriet was a creative, colorful, and complex individual, one of the dominant, fiery forces in pioneering our profession.

Harriet was well-known in the art therapy field for her numerous achievements: authoring eight books and over 70 publications, teaching and presenting workshops nationally and internationally, directing several art therapy training programs including Chicago's first art therapy master's degree at the University of Illinois, holding many offices on the executive board of the American Art Therapy Association (AATA), and being awarded the art therapy profession's highest honor, Honorary Life Member, in 1992. Up until the last year of her life, Harriet was still giving workshops, primarily in connection with her most recent book, Journaling Cancer in Words and Images: Caught in the Clutch of the Crab, that describes her own art and writing responses to the challenge of being diagnosed with an aggressive form of Stage III cancer (Wadeson, 2011b). She died peacefully, creating art through the last weeks of her life.

Harriet earned her undergraduate degree in psychology from Cornell University, and later earned two master's degrees before obtaining her PhD at Union Institute. Harriet was trained in art therapy at the National Institute of Health (NIH) by her mentor, Hanna Kwiatowska, the originator of family art therapy, at a time when there were no art therapy training programs in existence.

I first met Harriet as a graduate student, shortly after she began directing the Art Therapy Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in the early 1980s. Prior to that point, my journey to acquire formal art therapy training in Chicago had been lengthy and unsuccessful. I was teaching art to youth in a community-based setting in a neighborhood known for its heavy gang violence when I finally stumbled upon Harriet's first book, Art Psychotherapy (1980). Learning she had recently established a master's art therapy program at UIC, I promptly applied. Based on her own indirect path to the field, I expected Harriet to welcome me with open arms—or to at least be the smallest bit impressed with some of my art interests and experiences. During my applicant interview, however, Harriet was reserved, distant, and difficult to read. I left our first meeting feeling both inspired and intimidated, understanding more fully that the next two years were going to be more difficult than I had anticipated.

As a teacher, Harriet evoked strong emotional reactions from most of her students. There was typically no middle ground for students who polarized “for” or “against” her communication style and teaching methods. Students often held her up to impossibly high standards due to her larger-than-life reputation in the history of the profession. She was opinionated, outspoken, and didn't mince words when offering feedback. She also seemed disinterested in her students' approval, which students often read as her being judgmental or detached. Like all of us, Harriet had blind spots, which surfaced at times in the inherent, invisible power dynamics of the teacher–student relationship. At the same time, Harriet could be intensely empathic, encouraging, extremely funny, and supportive. She was full of contradictions that didn't seem to fit any idealized model of teacher or therapist.

In spite of Harriet's contradictory nature, I found myself quickly aligning with students that liked and respected her. I attributed part of her feisty personality to her being a product of a generation of women who needed to be fiercely assertive in order to have their voices heard. Students often forgot that Harriet had been trained at and worked for 13 years in the traditional, highly competitive, male-dominated psychiatric environment of NIH. She loved telling anecdotes about how hard it had been to hold her own ground as the only female non-MD when she was a young woman working at NIH, the setting where she developed her early identity as an “art psychotherapist.” In her autobiographical chapter for Architects in Art Therapy (Wadeson, 2006), Harriet wrote:

I often felt inaudible. I used to think that if only I said it right, I would be heard. This was before The Women's Movement. I can't describe the relief I felt when a social worker whom I respected highly told me she experienced the same thing. (p. 88)

Harriet's early identity as an art psychotherapist began at NIH, but underneath that persona I saw a free-spirited creative artist who rejected many of the patriarchal values and treatment models she had initially accepted in order to bring visibility and regard to the work we do.

At UIC Harriet would arrive for class dressed in the brightly patterned, richly textured Bohemian clothing she loved to wear, her long, wavy white hair creating a wild exclamation point to the look. After a brief and serious hello she might proceed to teach the class in that same serious tone—or abruptly shift into a playful, collaborative mode, leading students in spontaneous expressive rituals after creating masks, musical instruments, costumes, and props. Whether playful or serious, Harriet had a way of facilitating the learning process until it gradually resulted in profoundly important professional or personal insights. Harriet had no qualms about evoking emotional discomfort or conflict as a part of the learning process—and she never hesitated to throw a little extra gasoline on the fire. She would do that in a creative, imaginative way, using her artistic nature, or approach it wearing a neutral mask-like face that left her open to a wide range of interesting and typically negative projections from students. Sometimes, I wondered if she wasn't always struggling to balance her creative, expressive nature with the more serious aspects of her personality, the artist and therapist sides, and I would think again about the contexts in which she grew up, both personally and professionally.

Harriet enjoyed teaching and writing, but the longer I knew her the more her love of art took center stage. Using art expression as a process for self-exploration and self-nurturance was central to all of our learning at UIC: every article, book chapter, lecture, or project involved exploring it through our own art or another expressive mode, such as writing or drama. Harriet wanted students to understand the healing power of art from an in-depth, lived experience, rather than studying about it only intellectually. She created her own artwork alongside us, inspiring a process of fierce self-exploration and a firm belief in the value of art as a tool for insight and regeneration. One of the first things I learned about art therapy from observing Harriet's relationship to her personal art process was the courage required to dive deeply into whatever struggle was at hand, clinical or personal, allowing the image to give form to one's experience while opening the door to potential transformation. I remember frequently watching her create a piece of art, study it carefully, fully engaged in viewing what had emerged. She reminded me of one of my favorite drawing teachers who would tell us to turn our images upside down and every other way, in order to fully see what had materialized.

Harriet did not discuss art images in an interpretive manner, even though in her first book she equated certain imagery with specific diagnostic categories—another contradiction I never quite understood about her. The most frequent questions she asked about a person's art piece were those that would lead the person back to a reengagement with the piece. Harriet seemed to use more of a phenomenological approach to viewing art than other approaches with which she is often identified.

Reflecting back over all the years I knew her, the memory of Harriet creating her own art is the one that always comes immediately to mind. Harriet's belief in the power of art to companion herself and others faithfully through pain and suffering was the essence of what I took away from her teaching. She didn't verbalize that as much as she modeled it. After working with Harriet for two years, I never again questioned the value of art as a powerful healing process. I graduated from UIC with that deeply held conviction and far more skills than I had initially hoped to acquire through formal training with her.

One of Harriet's expectations of all her students was that we would embrace her pioneering spirit by continuing to expand the field through our internships and our careers beyond graduation. Many of her early graduates went on to develop art therapy programs serving marginalized individuals in unique settings throughout the Chicago area. She expected and taught us how to create our own art therapy jobs, how to assert the need to be compensated well for our work, and how to educate the public about the benefits of art therapy through presentations, workshops, papers, and exhibits. As a result, art therapy became well established and visible rapidly in the Chicago area within only a few years of her arrival. Many of us also went on to become well-respected internship supervisors and adjunct faculty for UIC and other graduate art therapy programs.

My work as an art therapist led me to gradually develop a comprehensive art therapy program at one of the largest outpatient mental health centers in Chicago. The process was long, tedious, and frustrating, but eventually resulted in transforming the single “arts and crafts” group I inherited into an extensive range of studio-based art therapy services for all ages, five days a week at five of our agency's sites across the city. I'm not sure I would have persisted if I hadn't worked directly with Harriet, whose pioneering strategies enabled me to tackle some of the endless roadblocks I encountered and to protect my program when administrators attempted to dismantle it. Like many of the new art therapy programs Harriet's UIC students created in Chicago, the program I directed eventually enabled thousands of clients living in isolation, poverty, and stigma to access art for promoting resilience, empowerment, and meaningful personal connections with others. Harriet's direct and indirect impact upon the development of art therapy in the Chicago area alone is difficult to capture.

While I was busy establishing the program I eventually directed, Harriet supervised me in my pursuit of becoming a Registered Art Therapist (ATR) at her dining room table with a small group of other UIC graduates, sometimes cooking dinner for us. The most significant memory I recall from that time was, again, with her supervision, using our own art to process dilemmas we encountered in our work as newly trained art therapists—and Harriet's visual responses that always enabled me to see the problem and possible solutions more clearly than our verbal discussions.

My professional path continued to cross Harriet's for the remainder of her life. We occasionally presented together at conferences, I co-authored a chapter for one of her books, I'd see her at one of the many client art exhibits around the city, and I taught part-time at UIC and other programs she directed for many years. Harriet always remained an enigma to me but we respected one another professionally and gradually came to know more about one another's personal lives. Over the years, however, most of our conversations centered around our respective art processes and imagery, which was the place we seemed to connect most easily. Additionally, I never lost the deep sense of gratitude for the formal training I received from her at a time when it was almost impossible to obtain.

Several years ago, when Harriet was in her early 80s, after not seeing her for a few years, she called to ask if I would facilitate an art class at the independent living residence where she had recently moved. By then Harriet had retired from teaching and had also survived a grueling ordeal with cancer from which many of us did not expect her to recover. Although her move assured her of medical care if needed, she explained that her new apartment didn't seem to have the right space for her to create art. She had taken to using an extra bathroom as an art space, which immediately reminded me of her first official art therapy office at NIH, when she had to use a hydrotherapy tub with a custom-made top as her first art therapy table. Harriet laughed about my remark related to that memory, then went on to state that the one available art class at her residence felt too structured for her compared to the way she was used to working, and she wanted to work alongside other creative residents. She asked if I would set up a more open-ended art class in which she and others could explore a wide range of media to create whatever they wanted.

I could sense the wheels turning, in terms of Harriet wanting to pioneer art therapy in one more environment that she knew would benefit significantly from its positive effects. Harriet emphasized that she was not interested in leading the class—she simply wanted to be a participant. She brought up the role reversal of me becoming her “teacher” after all these years. Although we laughed about it, there was a feeling of poignancy in her request. I knew she trusted me and was now asking me to provide the type of art experience she had taught me how to facilitate so long ago in order to reap the benefits of her own work for herself. I agreed to teach the class. I felt a responsibility to give back to her, similar to the way a grown child might feel in caring for an aging parent. She had been a “professional parent” to me throughout my career. I was happy and honored to offer her something meaningful in return.

For several years, Harriet consistently attended the art class I taught at her residence, until the last few months of her life. I always enjoyed seeing her and watching her work. The reversed roles of teacher and student were never an issue. What felt important was that we each carried important pieces of one another's professional history. Sometimes when we would chat I would recall a younger version of myself, newly excited about the prospect of learning art therapy from one of the field's great pioneers. At other times, our conversations enabled Harriet to reflect on her incredibly long and illustrious career. She often shared new anecdotes from the time period in which she had been my teacher, when her own career was still expanding. Unlike the other group members, I had witnessed her professional growth and understood it from the perspective of our shared career journeys.

True to her word, Harriet was never interested in leading the group. Although the class was not formally an art therapy group, Harriet must have felt pleased when class members frequently remarked at how “therapeutic” the art experiences felt, knowing one of her last pioneering acts had been to initiate a new way of approaching art in this setting. Although the all-female class members never discussed their art works from a therapeutic perspective, they showed up regularly and gradually began sharing powerful narratives of resilience, strength, courage, wisdom, personal accomplishments, and joy related to their respective long lives. Their generation was one of endurance and perseverance, and Harriet was no exception. Laughter was also a frequent ingredient of the group, with Harriet's dry sense of humor never failing to add to the mix.

When Harriet experienced a new set of serious health concerns that began weakening her physically, her commitment to her art process appeared to only grow stronger. I would observe her working at times, painting in her preferred medium of watercolors, rendering numerous variations of the same image repeatedly until she finally felt satisfied. I was never sure if she was painting the same image to master a technical problem, to understand its meaning more deeply, or both. I marveled at her ability to persistently pursue whatever she was seeking to know through her art, in spite of coping with serious physical pain. Sometimes I wondered about a particular metaphor or symbol, but never felt it was necessary to put words to her images. In one of her later papers, Harriet stated,

Why and how art making helps is the question at the heart of art therapy … . Why do I make art? Sometimes to grieve. Sometimes to play. But always to make something. I step back from my painting or poem and look at it, as in a mirror. But unlike the polished glass above my dresser, it shows me more than I knew was there. (Wadeson, 2011, p. 60)

Her art was serving its purpose, perhaps more than ever.

Shortly before she died, Harriet stopped attending the group. Although I regret being unable to say goodbye to her directly, six months prior I acknowledged her enduring impact on my career when Lariza Fenner, the President of the Illinois Art Therapy Association at that time, asked if I would collaborate with her on presenting Harriet with the Myra Levick Award for Excellence in Art Therapy. Harriet was in good health at that point but enough concerns warranted presenting the award sooner, rather than waiting for an official AATA meeting. Throughout the presentation, I saw many glimpses of the Harriet I had known 30 years earlier, when I first encountered her as an outspoken, well-known, forceful art therapy pioneer. I gave a brief speech, noting her enormous contributions to our field and emphasizing the often invisible ripple effects of her teaching upon my own career and the lives of so many others who benefitted from that aspect of her work.

Shortly after Harriet died, I had the opportunity to view the final art works she created during the last two weeks of her life. I marveled again at her ability to use her art process in the way she had always been able to—to give some sort of tangible form to what she was experiencing as she continued to grow more ill. It was comforting to know her art had remained a faithful companion, supporting her through the difficult terrain of facing her own death, hopefully providing a temporary respite from whatever physical or emotional suffering she experienced during her final days. Several of her last images were art expressions in the visual style with which I was familiar. One painting, however, was completely different from anything I'd seen Harriet create previously, reminding me again of her ability to surprise. The painting depicted the outline of what appeared to be a solitary female figure, walking forward, somewhat hesitantly but filled entirely inside with a shimmering gold color. The meaning of the painting is not possible to know, but I sensed it to be a powerful image of transformation and it was personally moving to witness it. I like to think it may have enabled Harriet to transition from this life into the unknown, perhaps afraid yet resolute, trusting the dazzling brightness of the figure to lead the way.

Harriet leaves an extensive, far-reaching professional legacy. She always described the field of art therapy as “home,” and AATA as “family,” in spite of “good times and bad” (Wadeson, 1993). Although she is known throughout the world for her numerous publications, research, presentations, and service to AATA, to me she will always be my former teacher—the person most directly responsible for the opportunity to pursue an incredibly rich and rewarding career. She was also an artist who inspired me and countless others to use art as a deeply healing process of self-exploration and renewal. She will be missed by many of us.