Art in Social Work: Do We Really Need It?

Are the Arts Relevant for Social Work Clients?

This is obviously social work’s first concern: Do clients really need the arts in their encounters with social workers? Can social workers “afford” to include the arts in the precious and often limited time they have with clients when those clients are facing “real-world” problems, such as difficulties accessing food and shelter that are at the base of Maslow’s (1968) hierarchy of needs? Furthermore, why should social work clients express themselves through art, focusing on their subjective experiences and thus disconnecting from a macroperception of problems that is at the base of social work? (Huss, 2017; Vode & Gallant, 2002).

These are valid concerns that should be discussed and addressed. One attempt to address these concerns proposes that the arts, when understood as an ecological gestalt of person in context rather than as a projective expression of the subconscious, become an intense medium for embodying and concretizing the interface between the client’s subjective psychological knowledge and the objective social knowledge by compositionally focusing on interactive tension or the relationship between the figure and background. In the arts, this relationship can take different forms, such as the relationships of the actor and the stage, the dancer and space, the melody and chord, or the figure and background. From this perspective, the arts can be understood as creating a phenomenological depiction of how the individual experiences the reality within which she or he lives. This source of tension is evolutionary in that it helps distinguish the central most important component (such as a mother) or most dangerous subject (such as a snake) from its background (such as the field) and thus to mobilize effective action through sensory and spatial stimuli. The arts thus may help interpret the self in context and plan actions on spatial and temporal levels with the help of past sensory memory and imagination to reconfigure future outcomes. The arts induce prompt perceptual processing, information gathering, and metabolic arousal that mobilize the organism for coping reactions (Hass-Cohen & Carr, 2008; Nelson & Fivush, 2004). Indeed, people have always used the arts to address and express pain and adversity so as to enhance their resilience through symbolic interaction and self-expression (Kaye & Bleep, 1997; Zelizer, 2003). In effect, this means that art is—on a deep neurological level—a personal interpretation of a social context that connects to problem-solving and resilience (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Sarid & Huss, 2010). The arts, as stated above, recreate connection among cognition, emotion, and the senses. In doing so, they create a unique, embodied configuration of the person’s interoperation of her or his reality (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Art may help to produce new, more enabling meanings and solutions on both the personal and the community level: Symbols and metaphors form a much broader hermeneutic base that might contain multiple and conflicting meanings in comparison to words that tend to be more linear (Dokter, 1998; Emerson & Smith, 2000; Liebman, 1996). Thus, the use of the arts enables systems to negotiate shifts from homeostasis to mobilization of change in a system that is stuck. This works by gradually shifting traditional symbols to contain new meanings and thus behaviors or role divisions, thereby concretely expressing and reenvisioning new social organization. Because the arts are primarily a communicative medium, they can enhance communication between social workers and clients. The arts can help marginalized experience be communicated because it provides clients a space to explore and define their experience through tension between figure and background. Experience is expressed in form and content that demands exploration and self-definition of one’s experience to decide how to communicate it to others. Compositional elements of images, such as shapes, size, color, brightness, intensity, location, position, contours, lines, movement, occlusion, shading, omissions, and texture within the image, together with objects, symbols, metonyms, and metaphors, enable the excavation of experience of the self in context (Foster, 2007; Freire & Macedo, 1987; Silver, 2001). According to Hooks (1992), the arts become a “space of agency in which we can…look back, and at one another, naming what we see” (p. 208). The shift to the arts may enable marginalized groups and individual clients counteract the verbal supremacy of specific “professional” narratives as well as restricting traditional, collective narratives that often hide social–structural problems of lack of resources and legitimize oppression (Dominelli, 2006; White & Epston, 1990). Furthermore, the arts can help to map the lack of resources and space (Mahl-Madrona, 2010).

On a theoretical level, then, the arts have much to offer social work clients in terms of exploring and understanding the person in context. When used skillfully by social workers, the arts can thus contribute to client resilience and empowerment. One example might be when a social worker discusses with his or her client the strengths depicted in their art work. However, using the arts in social work also presents methodological, cultural, and ethical challenges. Firstly, the viewing of “art as expression” (Lowenfield, 1987) and the fine-art paradigm that stresses individual uniqueness may not be a relevant art form for social work clients, who often come from varied, marginalized, and/or non-Western sectors of society. Additionally, asking someone who might feel that she or he has failed in life to create art even though she or he is not an artist might be experienced as yet another area of failure. Furthermore, asking a grown person who is not an artist to draw or use another form of art might be experienced as infantilizing and therefore disrespectful. Clients might also fear that their art will be used to diagnose them because the arts can indeed become legal proof of psychiatric, illegal, or abusive behavior.

Art, being an unfamiliar language to some clients, can also trigger strong hidden emotions that need a more clearly defined space for processing in therapy (Rogers, 1993). Additionally, social workers might not have the skills to guide clients to create aesthetically pleasing and effectively communicative art products (Rose, 2011).

These critiques raise valid concerns that need to be addressed. Like all other types of social work intervention, there is a danger that art can become a tool of oppression within power-infused interactions between social workers and clients. Art is not a magic language that bridges power issues or transcends methodological problems. The suitability of art as a methodology for clients is an issue inherent in all social work methods, including the use of questionnaires and verbal techniques that might also be culturally disparate from cultures that do not express private feelings to strangers (Bowler, 1997; Chamberlayne & Smith, 2008; Fine, 1994).

To reap the benefits of the arts when working with clients, social work practice needs to shift to a social–anthropological and phenomenological perspective, rather than a diagnostic-, projective-, or product-oriented understanding of using the arts. Social work’s use of the arts defines them within a phenomenological depiction of a specific culture and sociogeographic context, as defined and explained by the creator, and as an extension of verbal communication, rather than as a fine art product disconnected from its creator (Betinsky, 1995; Emerson & Smith, 2000; Rose, 2011; Safran & Muran, 2000). When the arts are used in such manner, there is an alignment between its use and social work values such as those of the importance of social relations, context, and culture.

Indeed, the arts in both non-Western and Western working-class contexts are often found in crafts (Lippard, 1990). In other words, the arts have completely different functions in different sociocultural locations, ranging from religious expression, serving as a didactic tool, decoration, or “making special” to a way of generating income or organizing space (Arnhiem, 1996; Hills, 2001; Mahon, 2000). Social work needs to encompass these social uses of the arts that go beyond Western art paradigms because these uses are relevant to clients and are currently unacknowledged as valuable by social work.

Are the Arts Relevant for Social Workers?

Social work is challenging to teach, supervise, and practice because it is an integrative profession that struggles with potential rifts between social and psychological theories, emotion and cognition, and global and culturally specific perspectives. Does social work really need the additional paradigm of the arts to add to this already flooded and potentially fragmented combination of knowledge bases? At present, the social work profession is threatened by globalization, privatization, and diminishing funds for intervention and supervision. Social workers thus have a complex job of defining and intervening in constantly shifting social realities using limited resources (Abramovitz, 1993; Bogo, Raphael, & Roberts, 1993; Gibelman, 1999; Gilligan, 2007).

One way to address this critique is by highlighting the fact that social workers’ multifaceted identity can be reframed as a source of energy and innovation. The challenge for social work education is in creating integrative spaces for diverse elements; as the arts are inherently integrative, they can be an important tool for integrative professionals. As previously stated, the arts connect compositionally between micro- and macrolevels of social work knowledge, between social worker and client, and between emotion and cognition (Huss, 2017). Thus, the arts can be a method for initiating multiliteral and experiential training and supervision for social work (Walton, 2012). Indeed, in our postmodern media-infused society, the arts are the most pervasive and persuasive tools for teaching and for changing behavior skills. As stated above, the arts are effective learning tools because they prompt fast, perceptual processing and information gathering (Bledowski, Rahm, & Rowe, 2009; Emerson & Smith, 2000; Joughin & Maples, 2004; Simmons & Hicks, 2006).

Growing technical–rational approaches and impoverishment of services have highlighted the need for transformative and critical methods that facilitate wider opportunities for social work practitioners to foster different ways of knowing and understanding (Gilligan, 2007; Haynes & Mickelson, 2000). Bandura (1995), Kinman and Grant (2011), and O’Sullivan (2005) describe the arts as a metaphor for social work knowledge that include diverse levels of information in a single coherent gestalt. From this perspective, the arts can help social workers solve problems by enabling new, integrative perspectives that can include moving closer or farther; merging, separating, or changing the size and contours of shapes; and centralizing or decentralizing the system’s overall gestalts (Huss, 2017).

The literature describes the workplace and power relations within it as a central stressor for social workers (Barlow & Hall, 2007; Carpenter & Webb, 2012). Shifting to the arts injects a set of creative mechanisms that helps transform this negotiation of power among social worker, service users, and policy makers to a distanced, metaphorical, embodied, and innovative field of reference. The arts encourage critical thinking because they are open to multiple interpretations (Arnheim, 1996). Social workers are often a processed group taught social work ideology. Managerialist and task-oriented supervision can prevent social workers from accessing their own tacit knowledge, blind theories, or inner experience, which are valuable sources of knowledge (Narhi, 2001). Thus, the arts can provide a space for social work students, as well as for service users, to excavate their own emotions and understanding of their work (Kaufman, Huss, & Segal-Engelchin, 2011). The arts thus help “disrupt” automatic thinking in critical reflective space, which is a much discussed aim of social work education and supervision (Bryant 2015; Chamberlayne & Smith, 2008; Freire & Macedo, 1987; Grant & Kinman, 2014; Huss, 2017; Sinding, Warren, & Paton, 2014). The arts can also help access and regulate social workers’ emotional reactions (Mishna & Bogo, 2007; Ward, 2008) by enabling a safe space to identify and work through their own and others’ emotional responses.

Social workers have high levels of secondary trauma and compassion fatigue due to the intense social problems they encounter and the impoverished services described above (Adams, Figley, & Boscarino, 2008; Barlow & Hall, 2007). The arts are, as argued in this article’s first section, inherently self-regulative and resilient. Since the need to address compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, and other types of social worker stress is clear (Carpenter, Webb, & Bostock, 2012), the arts provide less specific, cost-effective, self-sustainable methods for social workers to address trauma and compassion fatigue and to regulate emotion. Social workers are exposed to sensory experiences of trauma. As a sensory medium, therefore, the arts provide an accessible source for retrieval and also interpretation and reinterpretation of these experiences (Nelson & Fivish, 2004; Sarid & Huss, 2010; van der Klink, Blonk, Schene, & van Dijik, 2001). The arts help enhance meaning-making, and on this level, they can enhance post-traumatic growth in social workers. Social workers are often considered “saviors” in systems, working from their wounded selves. That they develop a healthy narcissism and play is important for resisting codependent relationships with service users. From this perspective, then, the arts can help create post-traumatic growth potential (Morrison, 2007; Richards, Campenne, & Burke, 2010).

Can the Arts Provide Social Work Evidence?

This final issue in fact includes two questions: Firstly, is there evidence of the arts’ effectiveness as intervention? Secondly, is there a rationale for including the arts as a methodology in social work research?

Concerning the first question, art therapy literature has gathered evidence of the arts’ effectiveness in interventions in many situations and with many populations, for instance, health trauma, self-regulating behavior, resistant clients, and other populations that are social work service users (Payne, 1993; Rubin, 1999). However, this evidence is based on art therapy paradigms focused on the subjective and decontextualized self. These paradigms are in theoretical opposition to conceptions of problems as emerging from context, rather than from the clients (Huss, 2015; Vide & Gallant, 2002). Social work needs to create research that focuses on the person-in-context paradigm used in its interventions, and this concept aligns more with arts-based research than with art therapy research. In this regard, the arts become a method for coproducing knowledge with service users—that is, art becomes a participatory intervention. This can include three directions: Firstly, the arts can enable an understanding of service users’ social contexts (Foster, 2007; Harrington, 2004; Huss, 2013; Pink & Kurti, 2004). Secondly, as described above, the arts enable the creation of a more embodied knowledge and of voiced emotions. Finally, the arts create embodied, emotionally driven, and reflective experiences, which can broaden the scope for capturing research participants’ experiences. Eisner (1997) describes the centrality of words in Western-style research as a limitation of the research itself and of “expert” imagination. Emotions are marginal in research; however, they are a central component of social work practice (Morrison, 2007).

On the level of power relations, then, the indirect character of images previously described as useful when negotiating social work hierarchies is also useful for researching marginalized populations who might have complex power relations with both researchers and others in their society (Bowler, 1997; Boyle & Harris, 2009; Shank, 2005; Zeitzer, 2003). In other words, shifting to visual language means giving up the professional power-infused acculturation of social workers to define a problem and solution mediated through Western abstract psychological and social concepts. Members of less powerful groups in society often express themselves through symbolic, narrative, and visual forms rather than through abstract concepts. As Lippard (1990) stated, “Educated Westerners use language as control, while poorer, less educated people, especially those from rural backgrounds, control language through expressive formulations” (p. 57).

On this level, the arts can become a meeting place that does not privilege social work discourses (Barone, 2000; Bowler, 1997; Foster, 2007; Fine, 1994; Huss, 2012; Tuhiwai-Smith 1999). Because the use of art creates more “gaps” in analysis, art is analyzed simultaneously from different and even opposing perspectives. Metaphors can generate new dimensions of understanding and augment—or trouble—our capacity for explanation.

How can the arts be used for these aims in research? Firstly, arts can provide additional research data by including, for example, body language, music, and visual culture. This enriches verbal data and adds emotionally embodied and often contradictory elements of social work experience that are lost when using only verbal rendering. A second model is using the art expressions of service users as research subjects (for instance, the hip-hop music of a group of youth). Thirdly, the arts can become a method that shows rather than tells how service users behave. The arts enhance “doing” rather than talking and thus enable the researcher to access a more embodied experience, for example, how a couple negotiates a joint page or canvas together. The arts can also shift their content to symbolic expressive forms that enable people to address culturally taboo or traumatic content in a nonthreatening indirect way. Finally, the arts can become the research product itself, making that product more communicative and accessible to many groups. Butler (2001) describes the use of art as a way to influence society by “making waves” that counteract hegemonic stands, when the art is itself the end research product, such as in a blog, film, play, or exhibition.

In sum, this article has addressed the usefulness of the arts for clients, social workers, and for social work research, attempting to demystify and thus clarify the characteristics of arts relevant to social work theory and practice. This article has also attempted to identify some of the advantages as well as the limitations of using the arts in social work with an aim to create more nuanced collaborations between social work and the humanities, arts therapy, and the arts in general. Further explorations and development of theory and practice for the arts in social work would provide a foundation for the unique uses of the arts in the social work profession.