Featured Arts and Healing Artist

Below is the article, and you can listen to my interview online here.

Art Break Day Co-Founder and Healing Artist: Lisa Rasmussen

May 2013 Lisa Rasmussen is a transformative artist, educator, curator and art advocate who truly believes and embodies the notion that art can change and heal the world. Lisa is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Art is Moving and the 3rd Annual Art Break Day. Art Break Day is a communty art-reach event that offers thousands of people the means and space to connect with their community via the art-making process. She is also the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Art 4 All People and AY Atelier Art, an international sanctuary for arts and consciousness online and in Malibu, CA.   Additionally, Lisa pioneered an award-winning expressive arts program for emotionally traumatized and abused youth, and developed a professional art gallery for the residents of Lincoln Child Center, a mental health facility in Oakland, CA.  She is also a professional artist, and her paintings are her spiritual practice. To learn more about Lisa and her work, please visit www.artismovingnow.com,www.art4allpeople.com, and www.ayatelierart.com.

Metamorphosis of Painting-B

My painting took another shower yesterday. Is it done?? 

Absolutely!!

Transform your Collection Today!!

Metamorphosis is for sale

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas

Size: 36" x 40" Depth 2 3/4

Price $4000

I won a Peace Prize for the Hands of Creation!

My work was chosen from 1000's of International Artist's, whose amazing ARTworks had  the breadth of vision and the empowerment of creativity and of PEACE!! for the  Peace Project Exhibition Fundraiser 2011. I  am very honored to be  chosen to be part  of such a new paradigm of creativity and peace. You can acquire a museum quality print of the "Hands of Creation" at The Peace Project and the proceeds will go towards  this amazing project. Funds from the sales of all the artworks will  give much needed support and aid  to the people of the Sierra Leone.



Your piece Hands of Creation won a peace award and was selected as part of the visions of Peace that will travel with The Peace Project Exhibit!   Know that your involvement with this art competition helped thousands of people RISE UP in Sierra Leone.

My Vision of Peace
The Hands of Creation series manifested from my teaching transformative art to vulnerable and emotionally troubled children at a mental health agency in the Bay Area. I was looking for a way to honor the creative powers of my amazing students. Because of privacy issues I was not allowed to photograph their faces. So I decided to take pictures of their creative tools —- their hands. Through the Hands of Creation project, I seek to honor that state of the soul where the artist/child experiences the ultimate liberation, which is the act of creation itself. It is my way of honoring the children’s essence and creativity, and counteracting apathy. My portraits are the revelation of the “other” to many viewers who know little about the struggles these children face. They bring to light the horrific plague of abuse that exists in our society. Through my practice and my teaching, I attempt to heal the wounded soul and to empower these magnificent and marginalized children~ lisa

Join me at one of the openings!

Exhibition Schedule:

Los Angeles

October 22nd
Gallery 9

___________

Long Beach
November 4th
EXPO Arts Center

_____________

Bay Area
November 9th
Swarm Gallery
Oakland, CA
___________

New York

Exact date and venue TBA

______________

Orange County, CA

January 7th
Showcase Gallery
Santa Ana, CA

ART=EMPOWERMENT! I was Quoted in the SF Chronicle!

Summer Learning Gives Kids Lessons in Fun!

Jill Tucker, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Third-grader Elaine Ma sat at a shady table in San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza dipping a paintbrush in pink, gold and green paint.

All around her some 800 children spent the first official day of summer hula hooping, playing board games, experimenting with bubbles and baking soda, hanging out in a bookmobile, drawing pictures, making bedazzled princess crowns and riding ponies.

"I'm painting a house," she said as she brushed a gold swoosh on the paper. "This is magical grass."

This, said organizers of the city's Summer Learning Day at the plaza, is what summer is supposed to be about: playing, thinking, creating, and ultimately learning outside the classroom in active, fun ways.

Researchers call it the summer brain drain. It affects all children, but especially those who don't actively fight it.

That's not the experience for too many children, particularly low-income kids, who spend their 10 or so weeks of summer vacation doing nothing, said Sheryl Davis, director of Mo' Magic, which helped organize Tuesday's event.

Without structured activities that stretch their minds, they "tend to gain weight and fall behind," she said. "They lose the summer. They come back to school two months behind."

Overall, most students forget two months worth of math over the summer. But low-income students also lose two to three months worth of reading skills. As a result, the achievement gap between white, Asian and wealthy students and their Hispanic, black and low-income peers, each summer increasingly widens.

On Tuesday, most of the students at Civic Center Plaza were participants in nonprofit and city-sponsored summer camps and programs although some families stumbled upon the event and joined the fun, too.

There didn't appear to be a single child at the event who, given a choice, would have picked a couch over the petting zoo, art project or bouncy houses.

Students who take part in summer enrichment activities, ranging from science camp, sports, family trips to museums or other programs, can boost their achievement levels, according to the National Summer Learning Association, which supported Tuesday's Summer Learning Day activities across the nation.

And the students tend to avoid packing on the pounds as well, more likely avoiding the obesity epidemic plaguing the country's youth.

In San Francisco, hundreds of primarily low-income children participate in nonprofit and city-sponsored summer programs, many featuring academic components. Those types of community programs can be critical to preventing summer learning loss, according to a study released this month by the nonprofit Rand Corp.

"They are often less expensive than school district staff, and they offer enrichment opportunities that are often similar to those experienced by middle-income youth during the summer - such as kayaking or chess, for example - that encourage students to enroll and attend, both of which are critical to program effectiveness," said Catherine Augustine, a senior policy researcher at Rand, in a statement.

At Civic Center Plaza, with her paper filled with a pink and gold house with magical grass, Elaine appeared to plugging that drain in her brain. Her paintbrush and imagination were running wild. A green stick-figure man appeared on the paper. He had just arrived home, she explained.

Lisa Rasmussen, who had set up her Art Cart for the event, listened to Elaine's story line and smiled.

"When children have art, they just swim in it," Rasmussen said. "They just thrive."

E-mail Jill Tucker at jtucker@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/22/BAUI1K0RD1.DTL

This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Photographer: Me from an amazing day at the Civic Center Plaza!

ART-EMPOWERMENT!