Dara Cohen: The Jewish Museum Partnership

Sweet Readers at the Jewish Museum

Back in May, 2011, Dara and I were invited to MoMA to a symposium centered on engaging people living with Alzheimer’s in the arts. Sweet Readers has just completed its first pilot at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) and the Jewish Museum was planning its first program to bring people living with Alzheimer’s or some form of dementia into the museum after hours with their care partners to enjoy a facilitated experience with the various works. It was an exciting time and groundbreaking in many ways and museums from around the world gathered to share their experiments and discoveries in an immersive two days which inspired many wonderful partnerships over the years. Dara was and continues to be an extremely warm and generous person who offered to pilot Sweet Reader at The Jewish Museum even before her own program was launched! During the subsequent years, hundreds of Sweet Readers and their adult partners have bonded with each other, the museum, the facilitators and the art. It has felt like family.

I have countless memories of breakthroughs, laughter, celebrations and community. Two stand out immediately: The first, in our second year, Frannie was paired with 6th grade Sweet Readers Addie in one of our after school programs at the museum. Frannie was a dance teacher from orange County who had moved to Manhattan to live with her daughter and son-in-law. Frannie loved children and was frequently surrounded by them in our programs, eager listeners to her many stories. Frannie had taken a fall and had a challenging hospital experience which left her practically catatonic when she returned home. We insisted she continue with the programs and for the first five of six sessions, Addie just leaned in and worked with Frannie, talking to her even though Frannie’s face appeared to be blank. Then in session six – in the studio, as Addie was leaning in, Frannie started to sing! The rest of the participants joined in and soon Frannie was not only singing, she was talking again!

The second memory was also in our second year, in a school program. 6th grader Anna was paired with Franklin and the session was in the galleries, before a huge video installation of performers doing a slow movement – similar to tai chi. Suddenly Anna and Franklin stood up from their seats and started to dance. Then two-by-two the other partners stood up to dance! It was beautiful – so much joy filled the space.

I asked Dara four questions; here are her responses:

1. How have you seen the Sweet Readers-Jewish Museum Partnership evolve over the past 10 years?

When the Jewish Museum hosted our first Sweet Readers session in September of 2011, I had no idea that it would be the beginning of a longstanding partnership that would grow and evolve over the course of 10 years. At first, we collaborated on individual programs, experimenting with the format of each session and testing out a variety of different prompts, activities, and projects to understand how looking at and making art in the context of a Museum could forge connections between our intergenerational participants. After so many years, I think we have created somewhat of a Sweet Readers-Jewish Museum community. We have watched some of the Sweet Readers participate in Jewish Museum programs throughout middle school, to then return in a leadership capacity as a high school student; we have celebrated birthdays and milestones with some of the Adult Partners over the course of many years; and we have had the same Jewish Museum teaching artists facilitating programs throughout. This consistency over time helped us build relationships, community, and connections.

2. You run the fabulous JM Journeys programs – also started 10 years ago! What do you see as the main differences between JM Journeys and Sweet Readers at The Jewish Museum? It is a coincidence that the Jewish Museum launched JM Journeys and its programming for individuals with memory loss at the same time that Sweet Readers was founded. What has always stood out to me about the Jewish Museum – Sweet Readers partnership are the connections that are created through the course of five or six sessions, and those “aha” moments when Sweet Readers and Adult Partners discover a shared experience or interest. We have had Sweet Readers and their Adult Partners discover that they both love boating or baseball or cooking; or that they both were born in a different state; or that they both sing or dance or are only children. In our session just last week, which took place virtually via Zoom instead of at the Jewish Museum due to the pandemic, one of our partner groups realized that they both speak Spanish, and spent their entire breakout session chatting away in Spanish. These moments of connectivity can bring a lot of joy, spark memories, and bring two people of very different ages and backgrounds together.

4. This issue is focused on partnership. In our programs, there are many types of partners – the Sweet Reader and the Adult Partner, our two organizations, the partnership between art & music, art & poetry, art & storytelling. We’ve experienced so many different partnerships together. What stands out for you and what impact do you think each of these partnerships has? One of my favorite programs that I had the opportunity to observe was in conjunction with the Jewish Museum’s exhibition Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, which featured a large-scale film installation of dancers moving in a slow and deliberate way. The Jewish Museum teaching artist asked the group of middle school students and adults to follow the movements of the dancers in the film with their own bodies. Next, she asked the intergenerational pairs to turn to face eachother, and have the adults mirror the movements of their middle school partners. Some of the seniors were in wheelchairs, or had limited mobility, but the energy of the movements that followed and the connection of the intergenerational partners to each other through these movements was striking. It was a really magical coming together of two generations through dance and visual art, and was the embodiment of the SweetReaders-Jewish Museum partnership. It is hard to separate out each component from the whole but all of them together make the partnership special.

5. This year we’ve experienced many different forms of art and duets; what is your perspective of the online engagement? Is it what you imagined it could be? Better? Worse? Vital during these times? Facilitating and participating in programming online instead of in person is a very different experience, and comes with its own unique set of challenges. For Sweet Readers & the Jewish Museum, the question has been whether it is still possible to engage an intergenerational group with art and with each other, without being able to be in front of original works of art in the galleries and without the range of art-making materials we have in the Museum’s art studio. And yet, we just completed our 5-session program over the course of five weeks, filled with a mix of laughter, art, poetry, and connection. It was not the same as in past years, but maybe even more vital for both middle school students and the adult partners to step outside of their day-to-day routine and connect with someone new, and to have the opportunity to see things from a different perspective.

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