The Art of Therapy

In the archived papers of sculptor Malvina Hoffman (American, 1885–1966), images of disabled veterans doing rudimentary crafts—making rugs, clay models, and paintings—sit alongside pamphlets for midcentury art classes explaining the therapeutic benefits of the arts for returning servicemen and women. Best known for sculpting life-size bronzes, Hoffman also dedicated many years to relief efforts with the Red Cross during two devastating world wars and personally taught art classes to returning veterans as a labor of care.

While art therapy is familiar to us today, the practice has a specific history. It emerged early in the 20th century, alongside movements for progressive reform and modernism in the arts, explains Suzanne Hudson, a Getty Scholar and leader of this year’s Getty Consortium Seminar. The questions raised by artworks produced in these therapeutic settings, past and present, are the focus of Hudson’s current research, motivated in part by her own experience and training as an art historian, art critic, and art therapist.

This year’s Getty Consortium Seminar, “Art, Therapy, and the Problem of Repair,” was inspired by the Getty Research Institute’s 2025–26 Scholars Program theme, which is focused on repair and renewal through the arts. Since 2002, these 10-week seminars have brought together top-tier graduate students from six Southern California universities for hands-on experience conducting research in Getty’s vast collections—such as the Malvina Hoffman papers—and making new connections with art and museum professionals. In this case, students learned from art therapists, artists, other Getty Scholars, and Getty’s mindfulness expert, Lilit Sadoyan. The healing power of art is a theme that resonates with current trends in museums toward mindfulness and “slow looking,” as well as studies in psychology and neuroscience now substantiating the timeless feeling that looking at and making art does something good for us.

In the early to mid-20th century, institutions like Hull House in Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York played crucial roles in framing art as a tool for health and mental well-being. At the same time, modern art exhibitions challenged the idea that art was always made by trained masters. Creative art making and display became commonplace across new sites ranging from hospitals and clinics to community centers and prisons and included makers from marginalized backgrounds—whether children, women, the incarcerated, or care workers and their patients. Beyond a new aesthetic, belief in the transformational power of art, deeply influenced by psychology and social reform movements, fueled these developments.

Although scientists today are eager to measure the biochemical levers and patient outcomes of art therapy, what happens to the artworks themselves? The art actually produced in therapy has long been sidelined in the study of art history, and Hudson has now invited her students to examine this orphan category of art.

One pamphlet, for instance, celebrated Art for War Veterans, a pioneering show at MoMA in 1945 that displayed works produced by veterans and other patients attending the museum’s newly opened War Veterans’ Art Center. The exhibition aimed to show how these works of creative artistic expression could “help veterans find themselves,” a productive step toward rehabilitation and reintegration into work and social life. But presenting these creations as cures, a common midcentury view of the high hopes for art therapy, raises even more questions for Hudson.

Artwork made in therapeutic settings is produced in an environment that honors process. The embodied experience of picking up a pen or brush can be as meaningful as the satisfaction of a finished work, and that creative process is choreographed, as it were, between therapist and patient. Much like an altarpiece removed from a church’s sanctuary, the art of therapy—sometimes simultaneously an artistic creation and personal medical record—cannot present the same set of meanings for an audience of strangers in an exhibition gallery. So the art produced in therapy provocatively returns Hudson to the foundational importance of where and how a work is made, questions that are used to interpret art more generally but become especially meaningful when a viewer’s response might be to ask, “Is that really ‘art’?”

For Hudson, the art of art therapy also centers the vulnerable body of the artist, not just the “patient.” Art makers experience periods of health and illness, responding daily to the culture and social institutions that surround them. Maintaining a sense of self while navigating these challenges, whether they stem from war, pandemics, mental health, or societal ills, also leaves behind its own sort of therapeutic archive that complements the artist’s output.

This was true for artist and UC Berkeley professor Katherine Sherwood, who, after a stroke paralyzed the right side of her body, had to learn new techniques to paint again. Sherwood’s canvases, exhibited with works by more than 80 other contemporary American makers in For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability—a Getty PST ART exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego last year—are just one part of her story of artistic process. She also taught a class that examined disability, her own and others, as both a subject for painting and a source of artistic creation.

This year’s seminar asks graduate students to slow down and look more closely at the art that comes from therapy, the artists grappling with their own vulnerability, and the therapeutic potential of art. Tucked away in Malvina Hoffman’s files, a design for a paper lion rendered in bold primary colors offered a guide for a veteran looking for creative catharsis or perhaps a simple distraction. Maybe, as happened to Hoffman’s own husband, wartime disfiguration had cost a livelihood that now had to be reimagined in a new, vulnerable body. With the ephemeral nature of the art of art therapy, these emerging scholars may not find all the answers, but they can start to trace the impulse to hold on through it all.