Jennie Smith-Peers
This year marks the first year that Americans over the age of 65 will outnumber those under the age of 20. The “graying” of America is already conversations that many arts administrators are familiar with, who are busy discussing how to deal with aging administrators and aging audiences. Yet, what this green paper seeks to address is how do we as service providers include access to our arts programming for everyone? Traditional ways of doling out arts programming are no longer sufficient. Older adults need and desire quality arts programs that give them the opportunity to grow and be creative. What is holding us back from including elders? At the end of the day, I believe that it is ageism.
We are living in the 21st Century and though many strides have been made in the last 30 years to view aging in a more positive light our society continues to marginalize them, make many feel unwelcome, and forces them to be invisible.
Karen Atkinson wrote on a wonderful article in the Huffington Post called, “Aging as an Artist” in it she quotes an older artist who is confronted with ageism as saying, “In the early 21st century being an older artist (and by this I mean being over 50) seems to generate the kind of repulsive response from curators and galleries that being a woman, a homosexual, and a person of color has generated in the past. Ageism, it seems, is the new bigoted response to what’s not selling, right up there with the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia that have marked art world snobbery and greed for so many decades.”
How can we stand for this? How can the arts community help to confront ageism? How do we hold ourselves accountable to the millions of elders in our society who lack access to quality arts programming? Perhaps it takes viewing them as having potential rather than deficits. Dr. Gene Cohen, author of The Creative Age, stated that while problems do accompany aging, “what has been universally denied is the potential. The ultimate expression of potential is creativity.”
By helping elders to embrace their creative potential sooner rather than later, we are affirming our own future as well.
I ask you: Would you rather grow old in community that still embraces you as an artist and as being who has creative potential or one that is shoved aside and forgotten about?
