Dolores Coe leads guided drawing sessions with students, caregivers and clinicians – and people who’ve lost language due to strokes or injury. And everyone communicates by making art.

Dolores is the Curator of the University of South Florida’s Art in Health Programs, a creative lab aimed at training health care professionals to carefully observe and decode what they’re seeing, hearing and communicating when they’re trying to heal patients.

In the Art in Health workshops, artists teach drawing, a composer shares tools for creating and understanding sound, a dancer explores how to see and record movement, and actors teach the listening and responding skills of improvisation. All of this is geared toward making medical and health care students better at their future jobs.

The program is part of the Institute for Research in Art that includes the Graphicstudio and USF Contemporary Art Museum.

Dolores shares the methods and focus of the Art in Health team – and the surprising offshoots of this program. Her inspiring stories include helping stroke victims communicate visually, and students developing practical tools now in use in doctors’ offices and trauma centers. She explains how Art in Health is a new career path for artists, one that is distinctly different from Art Therapy. And she shares how working in the Art in Health department changed the abstract paintings she creates.

Find out more about USF’s Art in Health Programs at cam.usf.edu/aih/aih_about.

And the USF Institute for Research in Art at usfcam.usf.edu.

Explore Dolores Coe’s artwork at dolorescoe.com.

 

Arts In is produced by Sheila Cowley.
Executive Producer, Barbara St. Clair for Creative Pinellas.