Cancer patients and survivors find healing at CAM art program

At Cameron Art Museum, art is not only on display but used as a tool for processing, coping, and healing for cancer patients and survivors. Art Enhances Health (AEH) provides community, mindfulness, and expression through its six-week integrated arts program. Led by Lorraine Perry and Donna Moore, participants are encouraged to regain their connection with play, be it through decorating the journals they’ll use throughout the program, printmaking, or painting with watercolor and acrylic.

“The program gives participants an opportunity to find relief through expression in a comfortable, safe, encouraging environment,” said Moore. “It generates a community made up of those challenged with similar experiences and feelings.”

Established in 2019, CAM partnered with Novant Health’s Zimmer Cancer Institute to bring the program to life, expanding it from a class in expressive writing to the six-week program offered today, which includes a free year of membership to the museum. Local organizations like The Ministering Circle also help fund AEH.

Key Takeaways

The details: 

• Led by expressive arts therapist Lorraine Perry and artist Donna Moore, AEH is a six-week program offered four times a year.
• Participants receive a free one-year Cameron Art Museum membership, extending their connection to the museum beyond the program.

The more you know:

• The next sessions are 1 to 3 p.m. on Mondays, beginning Nov. 2 through Dec. 7.
• No previous art experience is needed, and all supplies are provided.
• The program is free for cancer patients and survivors, but registration is required.

Offered four times a year, Moore attributes a sense of community as one of AEH’s key benefits. She shared that students often express how they want to take the class again. A recent group in particular grew very close and now meets monthly in the CAM Café for lunch, she said.

“There is a magical quality to the arts that allows the clients, who are oncology patients, a reentry into the world of our daily lives of emotions and experiences that are sometimes held back,” said Perry. “My aim for the class is to enjoy the process of expression, providing interest in playful, relaxing, and mindful ways to tell their story.”

September Krueger, CAM’s curator of education and public programs, noted research now backs up the therapeutic benefits of the arts, seeing not just creation, but accessibility to art as a tool for resilience and processing. The American Psychiatric Association found art therapy also contributes to pain management, diverting focus away from the physical body and lending a newfound sense of control.

Moore previously served as assistant to the renowned Wilmington artist Claude Howell at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She has been operating her life-drawing studio for the last 35 years, and she says she views the arts as fun, playful, and accessible.  

Skills learned in the AEH class can be easily adapted to a home setting, Moore said, which can provide tools for continual expression and newfound habits that benefit total healing.

Perry has worked as an expressive arts therapist for the last 40 years, with a background in both hospice care and oncology. She incorporates music, movement, writing, meditation, and visual arts into her lessons. Each session is different, although the lessons build upon each other. Perry begins the two-hour session with either slow observation of the pieces in the CAM Gallery or a guided mindfulness meditation in the Pancoe Education Center.

Moore then introduces an art-related technique or subject, and Perry provides quiet, reflective moments through free-flow journaling or poetry. Participants are introduced to all mediums: shaping and decorating plaster bowls, creating affirmation card decks, and experimenting with printmaking and collage. Towards the end of the six weeks, each student decorates a blank note card and writes a “Love Note” to themselves, self-addressed and mailed at a surprise date weeks later.

Each AEH program ends with a group show reminiscent of a gallery opening, where participants can share and remember their activities from the program. When asked about success stories, Moore shared personal notes from past AEH students.

“At first we are seduced into creative writing by Lorraine Perry, and then we retreat back into our pre-K years, encouraged by Donna Moore to do most anything we like short of throwing paint and ink at one another,” shared a former AEH participant. “It is so much fun to create in community with no particular purpose other than the recovery of our health. And truly beautiful writing and art is often the result!”