Smith Center for Healing and the Arts - community. creativity. support

We believe that engaging in the arts is life enhancing.

In addition to operating the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery on U Street, Smith Center offers a variety of programs and classes utilizing the arts and creative expression to promote wellness, wholeness, and recovery.

Particularly in times of stress, trauma, illness, and loss, engaging in creative activities can promote healing and wholeness in terms of engendering positive outlook, accessing inner resources, uplifting spirit, and seeing the possibilities inherent in life. Being creative is life-affirming and engages our capacity for wonder, hope and new beginnings even in the midst of great difficulty.

The arts have been shown to contribute to healing in many ways and provide:

• Tools for rehabilitation and recovery
• An outlet and way of self-expression
• A departure from physical and mental challenges
• Stress reduction
• New skills and new ways of being in the world

As children we are each naturally creative – it is an inborn and important gift we carry as human beings. For many of us, this natural ability often feels lost, ignored or buried under years of criticism.

Our earliest forms of medicine and healing included music, literature, and visual imagery. The first healers in almost every culture were shamans whose job it was to take care of the soul, and they did so in concert with symbols, drumming, songs, costumes and dance.

Everyone has the ability to create – if we can refrain from judgment and from thinking that the final project must be something worthy of hanging on a wall or listening to in a concert. 

Upcoming Arts & Creativity Programs