The Legacy of Edith Kramer presents a unique exploration into the life and work of the groundbreaking artist and art therapist. This edited volume examines the artist’s personal and cultural history prior to relocating to the United States as well as the later years when she worked as an artist, art therapist, and teacher as she developed her theoretical understanding of art therapy. Kramer’s solutions to creating a meaningful artist’s life run throughout the chapters within this book, and provide the reader with a sense of what is possible. Written by an international group of contributors, this informative new text offers a multifaceted view of Edith Kramer that will be appreciated by current and future art therapists looking to better understand Kramer’s exceptional mind and contributions to the field.

Edith Kramer is one of the pioneers in the field of art therapy, known and respected throughout the world. This collection of papers reflects her lifetime of work in this field, showing how her thoughts and practice have developed over the years. She considers a wide spectrum of issues, covering art, art therapy, society, ethology and clinical practice and placing art therapy in its social and historical context. Drawing on her very considerable personal experience as an art therapist, Kramer illustrates her conviction that art making is central to practice and cautions against making words primary and art secondary in art therapy. Art as Therapy offers a rare insight into the personal development of one of the world's leading art therapists and the development of art therapy as a profession. It will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in art therapy.

“A thrilling, challenging and educational book . . . examines the roles of spies such a Edith Cavell, Mata Hari, Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan” (Pennant Magazine). Women spies have rarely received the recognition they deserve. They have often been trivialized and, in cinema and popular fiction, stereotyped as vamps or dupes. The reality is very different. As spies, women have played a critical role during wartime, receiving and passing on vital information, frequently at considerable risk. Often able to blend into their background more easily than their male counterparts, women have worked as couriers, transmitters, and with resistance fighters, their achievements often unknown. Many have died. Ann Kramer describes the role of women spies during wartime, with particular reference to the two world wars. She looks at why some women chose to become spies, their motives, and backgrounds. She looks at the experience of women spies during wartime, what training they received, and what skills they needed. She examines the reality of life for a woman spy, operating behind enemy lines, and explores and explodes the myths about women spies that continue until the present day. The focus is mainly on Britain but also takes an international view as appropriate. “Tells the often surprising stories of some of the women who chose to become spies and to serve their country . . . An excellent work.” —The Great War Magazine

Celluloid Activist is the biography of gay-rights giant Vito Russo, the man who wrote The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, commonly regarded as the foundational text of gay and lesbian film studies and one of the first to be widely read. But Russo was much more than a pioneering journalist and author. A founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and cofounder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Russo lived at the center of the most important gay cultural turning points in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. His life as a cultural Zelig intersects a crucial period of social change, and in some ways his story becomes the story of a developing gay revolution in America. A frequent participant at “zaps” and an organizer of Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) cabarets and dances—which gave the New York gay and lesbian community its first social alternative to Mafia-owned bars—Russo made his most enduring contribution to the GAA with his marshaling of “Movie Nights,” the forerunners to his worldwide Celluloid Closet lecture tours that gave gay audiences their first community forum for the dissection of gay imagery in mainstream film. Biographer Michael Schiavi unravels Vito Russo’s fascinating life story, from his childhood in East Harlem to his own heartbreaking experiences with HIV/AIDS. Drawing on archival materials, unpublished letters and journals, and more than two hundred interviews, including conversations with a range of Russo’s friends and family from brother Charlie Russo to comedian Lily Tomlin to pioneering activist and playwright Larry Kramer, Celluloid Activistprovides an unprecedented portrait of a man who defined gay-rights and AIDS activism. “Schiavi tells a compelling story in this biography—from his re-creation of life on the streets of East Harlem and in Greenwich Village of the 1960s and 1970s to the way he conveys Russo’s excitement about his film research and popular education to his account of the AIDS years in New York City.”—John D’Emilio, Italian American Review “In [Schiavi’s] hands Russo’s life is both fascinating in its own right and a window into a larger milieu of activism during two critical decades.”—Italian American Review Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers Finalist, Gay Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Awards Finalist, Over the Rainbow Selection, American Library Association

Lani Gerity shows in this book that puppet-making, incorporating both art and narrative, provides an ideal vehicle for therapeutic work. It is particularly valuable in the treatment of dissociative patients, whose symptoms may include disturbances in body image, a dissociated sense of self, a disrupted sense of history and causality, and a feeling of alienation from the self. Lani Gerity explores the application of this in the context of object relations theory. She shows the creative process working on many levels for dissociative individuals and groups. Making puppets, three-dimensional representations of the human body, helped one patient to integrate her sense of her body image and herself. Using puppets and creating narratives about them encourages patients to build communities and to release themselves from the hold of the trauma of their pasts. Descriptions and analyses of Gerity's work with dissociative patients in the US and Canada is underpinned by a theoretical framework which encompasses theories from the arts therapies and from psychiatry.

Over the years, art therapy pioneers have contributed towards the informal and formal beginnings of this fascinating and innovative profession. The development of the art therapy profession concerns a special breed of person who discovered the profound and unique power of the integration of art and psychology and had the energy and drive to create the new field. Important movements and milestones are highlighted including the dilemmas and crucial events of art therapy's evolution. Unique features include: the early days and influence; the United States at the time of the formation of the art therapy profession; Florence Cane and the Walden School; Margaret Naumberg's theory of psychodynamic art therapy; Edith Kramer's theory of art as therapy; the Menninger Foundation, art therapy in Ohio and the Buckeye Art Therapy Association; Elinor Ulman and the first art therapy journal; Hanna Yaxa Kwiatkowska and the invention of family art therapy; a brief history of art therapy in Great Britain and Canada; the 1960s and their influence on the development of art therapy; Myra Levick and the establishment of the American Art Therapy Association; the pioneer art therapists and their qualities and patterns; the definition and expansion of art therapy; the development of master's-level art therapy; art therapists of color and influence; the history of humanistic psychology and art therapy; the expressive arts therapy; Jungian art therapy; and the art therapists that began in the 1970s. Chronologies and study questions for discussion appear at the end of most chapters. Finally, the book presents issues essential to the field today such as art therapy registration, certification and licensing, art therapy assessment procedures, research, multiculturalism and art therapy as an international phenomenon. This text will be of primary interest to art therapists and students, to art educators and historians, and to those interested in how mental health disciplines evolve.

A PBS NewsHour Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year in Nonfiction A brilliant scholar imparts the lessons bequeathed by the Black community and its remarkable artists and thinkers. Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase "read until you understand," a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life. Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students. Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden, and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy, and mercy allows her to move from her aunt’s love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron’s "Winter in America." Griffin entwines memoir, history, and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.