Archive for category: News

The new year brings the spirit of renewal, and at Art from Ashes, we are excited to welcome 2016 by looking towards what we can do to be our best selves. That means making our resolutions about what we want to accomplish in 2016, and also making a conscious decision to leave the less productive parts of ourselves in 2015.

Here are some of the ways our fabulous staff is looking to better serve our youth, our community and, not least of all, themselves in 2016.

Executive Director Catherine O’Neill Thorn:
I resolve to establish AfA in communities outside of the Denver/Boulder area!
I release my own failures; I’m creating all kinds of new ones instead!

Board Vice President Lewis Lease

My goal is to bring in $6000 in corporate sponsorships in 2016.

Director of Programs Ashley Cornelius:
I resolve to increase contract sales, renew standing contracts, and secure a committed bank of facilitators to match increased contract sales.
I will release trying to figure everything out and trust that things will fall into place as they should.

Volunteer Coordinator Nadine Louis 
I resolve to increase volunteer retention through continual contact and expand methods of appreciation.
I will release my mental space from uncertainty and letting my creative, adventure goddess
explore.

Program  Manager Courtney Chandler
I resolve to bring amazing new creative ideas for AfA program expansion!
I will release doubt and fear that stand in the way of my strength, confidence, and personal growth.

This year, we are looking forward to continuing to grow, reaching more youth and making even deeper trenches within the community. We hope to be a part of your 2016 as well, whether that is through attending a workshop, making a donation or volunteering your time. Here’s to a great year!

by Johnny Fuenzalida

One of the trademarks of being a conscious being is having a brain, an organic command center to execute the functions of all of our voluntary and involuntary actions. The way your eyes just blinked, the amount of bile your liver just secreted into your bloodstream and the firmness with which you press the elevator call-button are traced back to the luminous and tireless neurons racing through your synapses. This also means that the practices of making and observing art are both functions of our brains — from the choice of canvas to the feeling of utter elation after seeing a sold out Salt-N-Pepa show, our brains actually show measurable behaviors that correspond to our experiences.

In 2013, Professor Adam Zeman headed a team of neuroscientists at the University of Exeter studying the differences between bland, technical prose (a heater installation instruction manual was used) and poetry. Using functioning magnetic resource imaging (fMRI), the team discovered that while both prose and poetry activated the “reading centers” of the brain, the emotional impact of the poetry was found in the same part of the brain that lights up when we’re emotionally stirred by music. The study also revealed that poetry strongly affected the posterior cingulated cortex, a region of the brain where introspection takes place. Poetry, therefore, has the ability to produce the same “chilling” effect that a beautiful piece of music does, while giving us a heady dose of self-reflection. When it comes to creating the poetry, however, a different set of rules apply.

Dr. Matthew Lieberman, a neuroscientist at the University of California, conducted a study in which he scanned the brains of 30 participants while they were shown distressing pictures. The participants, while writing, tended to have decreased emotional activity and a strong increase in the pre-frontal cortex—the executive and cognitive areas of the brain. This means that writing about a scenario that normally produces anxiety can actually have a cathartic, therapeutic effect. However, the more vivid and descriptive the writing became, the subjects appeared less relaxed, essentially “reliving” a traumatic experience. Why? Let’s ask science!

In the 1990s, many scientists began to focus their research on how the brain responds to language. Going back to the trusty fMRI machines, they scanned the brains of individuals hearing and reading very descriptive writing. Researches had determined that the processing of language wasn’t contained in a single “module,” of the brain, as scientists had previously believed. Benjamin Bergen, researcher at the University of California, says that language is actually “a whole-brain type of process.”

Hypothetically, if I say that, sitting inside and writing this article while it’s such a beautiful day outside is as comfortable as wearing wet socks, your brain immediately recalls the sensory experience of wet socks, and also conjures up an image of me working at a computer. You could also probably determine my stress level based on the comparison of the image and the feelings. “The way that you understand an action is by recreating in your vision system what it would look like to perceive that event and recreating in your motor system what it would be like,” Bergen says.

This is the reason vivid and descriptive writing of traumatic experiences can increase levels of anxiety. This is also why it’s easy to cringe when reading an account of physical pain (especially one that we have personally experienced).

While the true nature of artistic expression is still an ever elusive concept, these experiments have shown that art is biologically devoted to mankind’s mental processing of the world. Throughout our day-to-day routine activities, we are unconsciously using the same mechanisms that engineer the most imaginative, empathic masterpieces that we know of.