Recovery Through The Arts

A Peer-Run Organization Promoting Wellness and Empowerment

Welcome to 9Muses Art Center!

9Muses Art Center is a drop-in center located in Fort Lauderdale, FL. We are a program of Mental Health America of Southeast Florida providing free peer-driven behavioral health support to adults with mental health and substance abuse disorders. The center has a fully functioning studio for fine arts classes and ceramic art. Participants may choose from a broad array of visual and performing arts.

Classes and personalized instruction along with individual studio time allow members to create according to his/her own personal “muse." Evidenced-based wellness activities and anxiety and depression support groups are held weekly. Members can engage in stimulating activity, free from the stigma of mental illness.

The center has been promoting wellness for over 20 years and functions successfully as a peer-run organization. Members are free to come and go as they please, participate in any art classes, support groups, and wellness activities they wish, or sit and enjoy coffee and conversation with other members. Positive interaction creates a sense of empowerment and promotes mental health. Come join us! See what a Muse can do for you...

A Step Ahead of My Tormented Mind

For me, the act of creating is deeply personal and transformative. I focus on the process of artmaking more than the final product. My art serves as a living visual journal. Oftentimes, I return to pieces and reflect on what they might be speaking into my life years after they were concepted. This exhibit highlights artwork I made to process the suicide of Nicole, the woman I shared life with for over 7 years. Creating art helped me mine for deep understandings and reconstruct inner and outer worlds shattered by shock and sudden traumatic stigmatized loss. My art held my trauma and grief at a protective distance and carried me forward - a step ahead of my tormented mind. I made my trauma, grief, and loss the subject of my art, ultimately converting the toxin into the antitoxin and revealing the medicine of the arts. Consequently, the art allowed me to have an embodied experience, at points connecting with the divine. Part of my recovery journey involved earning a degree in art therapy and mental health counseling. As a registered art therapist, this exhibit tells the story of my experience through clinical and practical applications of art therapy. As a suicide postvention specialist, I arranged the pieces throughout the exhibit to follow personal developmental milestones of the suicide loss experience: stabilization, integration, and posttraumatic growth  

ROOTED IN WELLNESS

9MusesArtCenter is happy to welcome you to our end of the year exhibitionfor 2023, Rooted in Wellness. We asked participants to conceptualize wellness goals, a state of well-being that includes: an individual realizing their ownabilities, coping with the normal stresses of life, working productively and fruitfully, and the ability to make a contribution to their community. This exhibition focuses on artwork that aims to define wellness through answering personal questions about self-development, good-quality social connections, beliefs in overcoming hurdles, sense of purpose, and having a positive self-concept. We aimed to emphasize that mental health begins with each individual. Personal wellness means being physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually healthy. A healthy lifestyle helps balance all these aspects to achieve wellness. Our decisions and choices impact both our short-term and long-term wellness. However, we are still interconnected through shared needs that can only be addressed when we are aware of one another. Our community serves as the soil in which we live, and nurturing the garden around us is vital for our own development. Thank you for joining us and enjoy the show.

CHASING EQUITY

9MusesArtCenter would like to invite artists to submit for Chasing Equity; an interrogation of inequality, struggle, and the power dynamics that maintain stratification and inequity.

Chasing Equity’s focus is to address institutional disadvantages for BIPOC populations, but we are particularly interested in engaging topics that are intersectional as well, such as examining Black and Brown experiences that intersect with LGBTQ+, gendered, and/or disability. Artwork can confront how inequity is perpetuated, and/or ways to address inequity that would resort in meaningful, paradigm-shifting change.
Artists are invited to examine institutional and social structures that contribute to and codify racial inequity.

We ask that artists create new visions and imagined spaces that strive for equity. Artists should reflect on their personal relationship to equity and inequity. We would like artwork that inspires a drive for change and progress. While we are not opposed to works that are centered on historical roots of inequity or change, we would like artists to consider how inequity exists in the here and now. We welcome works that have personal examinations on how artists themselves have knowingly or unknowingly perpetuated structural inequity and confront these histories. We would like works that
challenge the self and the viewer in their complicit support of racist structures. Artwork can be celebratory of existing progress but should be critical of its shortcomings. We welcome works that emphasize truth through discomfort over comforting lies of an inevitable march towards equality.

Chasing Equity is about pursuing the personal within the structural, and how those narratives are necessary to challenge the status quo.

Contagious!

Perhaps we are all tired about talking about the pandemic, but even as we struggle through it, as we keep up with the wavering numbers, mask rules, and vaccine operations; it’s time to talk about how it’s affected us.

Our 2021 theme, CONTAGIOUS! asks us to explore the perception and effects of illness, disease, and trauma. We asked artists to consider plague histories and the art that resulted. We ask that you look at how the present situation is shaping our artistic lives and production. We ask as we look towards the future and how our collective trauma, loss, isolation, and instability will shape us, our art, and our humanity.

This year, we instructed artists to “stay inside” a limited color palette, and to push the boundaries of art production when our color resources are reduced. In our wellness courses, we looked at how trauma is “contagious”, and the effects of collection and intergenerational trauma on mental health.

So, we invite you to join us, from a safe distance, to find the strength to confront

illnesses, and begin to heal.

CONTAGIOUS!

Opening exhibit is Friday December 10, 2021 from 6-8PM.

7149 West Oakland Park Blvd.

Lauderhill, Florida 33313

for more information call 954-746-2055 ext#108 or email [email protected]

Exhibit 302.0

When we conceived of EXHIBIT 302.0, we created it with the idea that it would aid in combatting social stigma and celebrating the progress we had made in the LGBTQ+ community. These past few months have proven that progress is not a steady, linear rise towards equality, but it continues to be something we must fight to maintain and move forward. Named for the original diagnosis code for homosexuality, “exhibit 302.0” is an art exhibition focused on the intersections of mental illness, queer identities, and pathologization. Artists were invited to explore joy and triumph within these designations.

A grant in support of this exhibit was awarded to Mental Health America of Southeast Florida; 9MusesArtCenter, this exhibit was made possible by the following Funds at Community Foundation of Broward: Gay and Lesbian Broward Community Fund, Richard Frisby and Edward Burkhart Fund, Charles L. Ross Fund, The Robert Elmore Family Fund, Everett H. Metcalf, Jr. Unrestricted Fund

9MUSESARTCENTER would like to SINCERELY THANK all of the ARTISTS who shared their EXPERIENCE in the form of art. EXHIBIT 302.0 PARTICIPANTS:

RICH ALDRET

CHRISTIAN DOERING

KEITH MORRIS

CHRIS NERVI

NICOLE STORRS

KATIE LEONARD

JORGE ALARCON

AXEL MARTINEZ

JILLIAN BLAKE

MARK FLANDERS

DARREN THOMPSON

CHRIS YOCULAN

Create Art to Express Yourself and Maintain Your Mental Health

9MusesArtCenter

Education

9Muses members have an opportunity to engage in both arts and wellness classes. Members can learn to create unique works of art through a variety of fine and performance arts classes. Attendees can develop personal skills and techniques through wellness courses.

9MusesArtCenter

Prevention

Art classes, wellness courses, support groups, and social events at 9Muses Art Center are natural supports. These supports can prevent adverse outcomes for those suffering from mental health issues. Natural supports and education create resiliency and create habits and strategies to help prevent hospitalization or behavioral health issues.

9MusesArtCenter

Advocacy

As a community staple for more than twenty years, 9Muses Art Center is a trusted voice in mental health matters and advocacy. As a peer-run center, we are advocate on behalf of the community from a consumer’s point of view. MHA and 9Muses Art Center regularly participates in local and state boards and with partner organizations to further the goals and dignity of those with mental health issues.

9MusesArtCenter

Empowerment

We are an organization focused on empowering the individual to create, execute, and maintain their mental wellness. Arts classes help members develop a wide range of practical and artistic skills which empowers them to express themselves. Our wellness courses teach members to empower themselves to advocate for their needs and empower them to take control of their mental health.

9MusesArtCenter

The Nine Muses

Daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory) in Greek mythology are the inspiration of artists and scientists. Their names are Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania.

9MusesArtCenter

Where you can call and talk to someone who listens, understands, and cares.

(954) 578-5640

Hours of Operation

6:00–10:00 PM

Monday to Friday