Founded by Biola Journalism and Art alums Joshua Watson and Juliet SanNicolas de Bradley, Art for the Isolated brings together visual artists and poets whose work is paired and then printed on beautifully designed postcards. These postcards are gifted to hospital patients suffering and recovering from COVID-19 and to hospital caregivers. Watson and his team have solicited work from local and internationally recognized artists and poets, and have partnered with hospitals and healthcare workers to bring these thoughtfully crafted artifacts to those who may be cheered by them.
Several of the project’s contributors are Biola faculty and alumni. Included among contributing poets, for example, are English faculty member Chris Davidson; Biola alums Jonathan Diaz, Jolene Nolte, Jordan Nakamura, and Michael Shia-Tian Liaw; and our department’s Administrative Coordinator, Alea Peister (who is also a Biola English alum).
You can read, below, an interview we conducted with the founders of Art for the Isolated about the project’s inception, vision, and mission. You can view examples of the work, and donate to help support it, on the project’s website.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You’re both Biola alumni, and you both have artistic practices. Can you tell us some basics — when did you graduate, what is your artistic practice like, etc.?
Joshua Watson: I graduated from Biola in 2011 with a degree in Photojournalism (or “Visual Journalism”). At Biola, I made a lot of connections with folks in the Art and English Departments.
After graduating, I studied for an MFA in photography at Hartford Art School. My artistic practice is in photography.
Juliet SanNicholas de Bradley: I double majored in Art: Photography and Communication Sciences & Disorders at Biola. I graduated in 2014. I just finished up my Master’s in Communication Sciences & Disorders at Baylor University.
My personal artistic practice is primarily in photography. I also have practices in book-making, installation art, piano, and dance.
In a few sentences, what is Art for the Isolated?
Art for the Isolated is an expanding and diverse collective of artists and poets who are creating generative dialogue between text and images. The resulting pairings are printed in the form of postcards and given to hospitals to be distributed to isolated patients and caregivers across the country. Participating artists and poets have submitted photographs, paintings, and poems (in both English and Spanish) with patient needs in mind. We collaborate with each hospital to creatively generate processes to fit each specific medical context. The artworks, the location, the method of distribution are all tailored to best support the patient and hospital staff’s needs while adhering to each hospital’s sterilization practices.
Tell us about the founding of AFTI. Where did the idea come from? What helped the project “take off,” as it were?
Josh: I had the idea one day and immediately started making phone calls to see what might be possible. Shortly after I started making calls, many artists and poets jumped on board, and then Juliet got involved.
I’d like Art for the Isolated to outlast Covid-19. But even before it began I felt a certain burden of responsibility . . . that is, a burden to seek out what is the way that I, as an artist, can or should respond to moments of social crisis. I had watched many moments of crisis over the preceding years, and hadn’t found that I had a response to which I could meaningfully lend my voice and hands. But when Art for the Isolated began to take off, I realized the moment had come for my gifts to be mobilized toward such a response.
Juliet got on board when I texted her to see if she’d be interested in participating. I first asked if she wanted to submit a photo. Then, I asked if she wanted to talk the project over and share her ideas. I knew she had extensive experience in hospitals from many different perspectives, and thought she might have something important she would want to offer to the project. Not long after that, I got news that her husband, Ryan, is on the ethics committee for a hospital in their area. We started talking about distribution of the art-objects we had in mind to hospitals, art in hospitals, hospital experiences . . . etc.
Juliet: Right away, my question was “How do we convince people that this is a good thing?” I’m very research based. I have been doing a lot of research on difficult to quantify topics. I thought, “What if we made a research study out of this? What if we could talk to folks in hospitals to understand exactly how these cards are received?” I knew this would be good for my research, but also extremely helpful for securing grants to financially support our work. I started collecting quantitative data, and at some point became just as invested as Josh. The research question had a lot to do with getting me so invested. Ultimately, adding the research component was really helpful for convincing people of the legitimacy of the project.
Josh: When you do something like this, you get a lot of people saying “sure I’ll help!” But it doesn’t stick. But with Juliet it was like, “no, really. I’ll help.” At some point, we realized Juliet was asking the questions of this idea that I didn’t even know how to ask, and didn’t know should be questions, but that were necessary for the success of the project. It became essential that she be involved so she could ask those kinds of questions, which we knew would support the project and allow it to become something I couldn’t have imagined it could be.
Juliet: One of the reasons Josh reached out to me is that I have a practice of giving art to people as gifts. At a recent summer camp we both worked for, I gave art pieces articulated on what essentially amounted to postcards to every staff member and student. I did it as a prayer-project. I spent a lot of time choosing them.
That idea of gift-giving as a unique form of art making has become a guiding question for Art for the Isolated. If you’re giving art as a gift, how does that change how it’s chosen? How it’s made? How it’s received? We continue to be curious about that set of questions.
Juliet, you took Vision, Voice, & Practice (VVP) when you were a student at Biola. Did your experience in that class bring any influence to bear on this project?
Juliet: VVP was monumental for me in terms of understanding who I am as an artist. I think I took it 3 times!
I’m a huge reader and am also trained in the arts. The opportunity to experiment with language and art-making in the same classroom was so significant for me, and that question — of how the pairing of text and image makes and affects meaning — has been explicitly explored in Art for the Isolated. At some point we brought on Jordan Nakamura — also a Biola grad, and a poet — to help us with this.
For example, how do you know a given image “fits” with a poem? We don’t want the pieces, when paired, to explain each other. Rather, the way we’ve been thinking about it is that we want the picture to open up the poem, and the poem to open up the picture. We want it to be a continually generative experience — for each to make you want to keep returning to the other.
One of my favorite meetings was the one in which Josh, Jordan, and I carefully chose pairings between images and poems. It was so much fun, and it was like magic each time we found poems and images that were clearly “meant for each other,” as it were. It felt like being back in VVP, but as adults.
How do you expect the work you’re distributing to be used by those who receive it?
Juliet: Hospitals are typically sterile spaces with really bad art. There are not many objects or images that can remind patients of that which is true. If there is art, it’s sickly, sentimental stuff that claims everything will be okay — even if, as a patient, you know it might not be.
When we entered this project, we asked ourselves, “Why would we gift art to people in hospitals?” Early on, we knew it was important to acknowledge that all of our patients are facing death, and might die.
We did and do not want to act out of a savior complex-style impulse. We don’t want to give patients art that undermines their experience or speaks for them. We found ourselves asking, “What can we do for hospital patients with art?”
Our answer: “With art, we can remind them of that which is true.”
At the moment we’re actually pivoting more toward healthcare workers. It’s surprisingly difficult to get art in the hands of hospital patients. For now, we’re aiming to give the art to overburdened healthcare workers in the hope that they will be moved to continue the cycle of gift by giving more of our “postcards” to their patients.
Josh: I echo everything Juliet said. I would just add something Gregory Orr says (which has become a foundational principle for Art for the Isolated) in his On Being interview with Krista Tippett. Orr discusses how poetry (and, in the case of AFTI, visual art) does not remove grief. It simply provides language that can act as an ordering principle for grief, so that through language a person might find meaning within the chaos of their own experience, or even in the chaos of the world. Poetry gives them a tool for naming and claiming that experience.
That is one of the uses for poetry and art. What better audience for this use could possibly be found than hospital patients? People who may be experiencing grief or trauma, or the prospect of mortality, or all of the above — who are facing their own mortality laid bare?
Have you heard back from healthcare workers or patients who have received the postcards? What has the feedback been like?
Josh: People feel deeply encouraged by the postcards. Caregivers that have been able to pass the cards out have passed on the gratitude of patients. Some of the ways the cards are being used are totally different than what I expected. For example, in one instance we heard of a caregiver sitting bedside and reading a poem to a patient.
We hit a point in LA and the Central Valley where nurses were so overwhelmed they couldn’t actually facilitate this project. Every step of the way we’ve tried to do something generative, but as we started getting postcards into hospitals we realized we were just giving nurses another task. At that point, it occurred to us that we needed to start by giving the caregivers a good gift, so they could organically give the gift on to their patients. Since then, we’ve been putting the weight of our effort into making sure caregivers are receiving a gift first. We give them a few extra cards so they can pass the gift on to patients as they see fit.
Who are some authors, artists, or other projects who have helped or inspired you in the founding of Art for the Isolated? How?
Josh: We created a curriculum based on Art for the Isolated, which is founded on the work of three writers and artists who have inspired our work. We’re actually going into schools now and asking students to engage our project through this curriculum.
Gregory Orr: I first came across his work via an On Being episode in which he discusses poetry and trauma.
Robert Adams: Robert Adams has been my North Star since art school. Adams demonstrated to me the need for great art — whether poetry or visual art, whatever the medium — to be in spaces like hospitals. He made it clear to me that this project could be the most appropriate artistic gesture that I could muster.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer has talked about how gift-giving can change the world, because it changes the power dynamics of the world.
As students, Juliet and I have engaged with and been changed by the work of these artists and thinkers. Putting their work in our curriculum felt like an appropriate gesture of gratitude.
What’s a moment in this process that you have found personally meaningful, exciting, or artistically encouraging?
Juliet: When we met with Dr. Shapiro. She’s a professor at UCI, and her focus is on the Medical Humanities. She’s really encouraged me in the idea that there is a place for scientific study that looks at art. Medical Humanities is this exciting new field that is looking at art and using scientific tools to roughly quantify what type of experiences people are receiving as they interact with art. Do they feel more or less isolated? More connected to their caregivers? To the world outside? My science brain and my art brain, together, felt engaged with an engage-able project during and after this conversation. I felt affirmed and encouraged to keep pursuing these sorts of research questions. It was so exciting!!
Josh: It has been meaningful to have discussions about this with people I looked up to when I was younger. I recently had a conversation with Dan Callis about the artist’s vocation and our effort. (By the way, collaborating with former professors on AFTI has been a real privilege.) Our discussion reminded me of why I was interested in art in the first place — that is, to make objects of consequence.
It is often said artists can become tempted to make our work for purely market-driven reasons. We may even rationalize this shift in intention by convincing ourselves we’re contributing to some greater “conversation” simply by putting our pictures in a white cube for wealthy collectors to gawk at. While the art-market is an easy target for critique, it can sometimes feel like many artists still haven’t reconsidered ways of humbly finding an audience that may benefit from our work. Art for the Isolated has felt like a good step toward this for me, and has reminded me why I felt art was worth making back in college.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Josh: We’ve wanted this to consistently be a project about discovery. Art that isn’t curious, that isn’t engaged in reality, cannot speak to people who are at confounding crossroads. If we want to speak to people, speaking from a place of resolution is not a good place to start. It did not feel sufficient to simply give a piece of art from someone’s “best of” collection, or to just have them find and offer their favorite poems.
If we want the patient or the audience to receive the gift of this project, and for that reception to be a generative process, we think there needs to be a question at the inception of the gift. The collaborative relationship between text and image felt like an apt one to wrestle with, and that has ultimately opened up all sorts of new questions for us. Artists and poets are seeing their work be used in ways they hadn’t considered their work could be used. And that discovery leads to new discoveries, and so on.
You think something will work one way, but by simply engaging the process you discover that your initial ideas were not the right ones. Juliet’s involvement, and the questions she brought to the table, were among those moments of generative surprise.
At every step, this project has become something we didn’t expect it to be, and that’s by design. We hope that sense of discovery is what we’re passing on.
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