GO! Arts

Opened in 2005, Bihl Haus Arts (BHa) is located on the premises of Primrose at Monticello Park Senior Apartments, a senior center serving low-income, primarily minority single women. Provision of art classes for seniors living on the property was the idea of a resident and gallery docent, who noticed many of her aging peers were leading isolated lives locked in their apartments. From this beginning in 2005 at the gallery, the Bihl Haus GO! Arts Program has expanded capacity to serve more than 400 seniors each week at 17 residential and community centers in nine of ten city council districts across san Antonio. Fifteen professional teaching artists currently offer almost 40 GO! Arts classes each week over three semesters (Spring, Summer, Fall) under contract. With additional contractual support, we have the expertise to extend services to current and future. We envision being part of an expansive landscape of therapeutic, artistic and community-based programs for seniors. In BHA’s next ten years, as the senior population continues to grow, we could meet demand for GO! Arts programming in virtually every community center in the region – contingent on corresponding growth of our organizational capacity. The GO! Arts program directly advances BHA’s mission of “Creating Community through the Arts.” Through GO! Arts, BHA is proud to be the prime exemplar in San Antonio of the rapidly emerging international field of “creative aging.” A growing body of program evaluation and academic research shows that seniors with opportunities to engage directly in artistic activities are likely to enjoy improvements in physical and mental health and greater self-reliance, enhancing individual well-being and lowering costs of long-term care. With impetus from research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Arts, and advocacy from new professional organizations such as the National Center for Creative Aging, recognition that arts engagement can improve seniors’ health has grown. BHA has contributed directly to this evidence-based recognition of these benefits through two investigations of the GO! Arts program by academic researchers, both published in peer-reviewed international journals (2012, 2017). With almost 15 years’ experience in the field, BHA is the only nonprofit program in San Antonio providing art classes exclusively for older adults. Classes and materials are free to participants, which removes barriers for those of limited means. They are provided on site at facilities where seniors live or attend, eliminating travel to unfamiliar sites. They are ongoing, offered 50 wks/yr, rather than as weekend or month-long workshops. BHA classes are taught by highly trained professional teaching artists experienced in working with elders (we recently added training in teaching seniors with Alzheimer’s disease, for a new program at the Grace Place centers, and through Vet TRIIP for our new Forward, Arts! program for veterans with PTSD). The creative, hands-on engagement in the arts that BHA classes—through multiple disciplines from drawing to creative writing—helps participating seniors to be healthy, engaged and independent.