As memory fades, art brings moments of beauty and connection

Rose Oakman stood in front of abstract Oregon landscape paintings, dripped and daubed in vibrant colors, on a Sunday afternoon in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

At the Dec. 7 session of Community and Connections, a monthly version of the museum’s Art Heals programming geared toward people in the early stages of memory loss, attendees weighed in on James Lavadour’s landscapes.

Oakman, who directs the program, asked the class: What did they see in the paintings?

Charles Duryea said the landscapes were fiery. Ana Bolanos liked a piece with mountains painted in yellow, her daughter Maria Bolanos-McClain translated for her from Spanish. Susan Bliven noted how the landscapes looked like they were changing.

“For something as stable as you expect a landscape to be, there’s such movement,” Bliven said. “It’s almost as if it’s alive.”

“That’s beautiful,” Oakman responded.

Oakman, with a background in both studio art and gerontology, designed and implemented the classes at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art starting in 2018, while she was getting her master’s degree in nonprofit management at the University of Oregon.

The museum’s programming for people with memory loss comprises two different sessions, both free: the monthly Community and Connections and the more intensive, five-week Reflections and Connections course. It’s common for people, when they finish the five-week run, to start attending the monthly sessions.

Now the museum’s program manager for well-being and community engagement, Oakman said she sees the program expanding beyond people experiencing memory loss, to a general creative aging program for seniors to keep engaging with art — and each other — in their later years.

“This is my 15th year of working with the dementia community. So unfortunately, I do know a lot of people are nearing end of life,” she said. “Trying to capture these really beautiful moments that are so special between the loved one and the person living with dementia is really what keeps me going.”

Taking time with the art

The December Community and Connections sessions, like the others, started with the discussion in the gallery. That discussion wrapped up with a collaborative poem on what Oregon looks, sounds, smells, tastes and feels like, inspired by Lavadour’s take on the land. People conjured sense memories to fill in their answers.

There were jokes about cannabis for the “smell,” sure. But people noted the sound of crackling fires and chainsaws. The taste of salmon, marionberries and the fresh fruit that Duryea — who previously ran the farm Grateful Harvest — once grew with his wife, Jessie. The feel of carpets of lush grass and coastal fog.

Standing behind the rows of chairs were studio assistants, who say the Connections sessions are rewarding experiences for them as well.

After the gallery session came group art-making in the museum’s studio space, with the class decorating wooden Christmas tree ornaments.

Studio assistant Mari Lamont zipped from person to person to see their ornament decorations as people worked. Lamont, who completed her second bachelor’s degree in December 2024 during a later-in-life pivot from biology and psychology, said that working with the Connections sessions is a way to hear years of wisdom. It’s also a way to heal a personal wound: not understanding her own grandmother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis when Lamont was 19 years old.

“It’s a way of me being able to give back, and to have empathy and understanding,” she said. “I only got to see the onset of my grandmother, because she would ask the same questions over and over. At first, I didn’t know. I just thought, ‘Oh, how cute.’” 

Grace Douglas, a studio assistant and 24-year-old senior at UO studying folklore, said that the discussions in the Connections sessions are “pretty similar” to the takeaways her undergraduate peers make in class, but with one key difference. 

“I find that younger people are definitely more rushed and seeking the next thing,” she said. “This crowd will sit and take their time with it. Nobody’s ever antsy to move on to the next thing.”

The thrill of creating

For Bliven, who noted the Lavadour landscape’s changing quality, the sessions have been a lifeline as she has dealt with vascular dementia caused by surgical complications. Bliven, 72, has participated in the Connections sessions since the first one in 2018. 

Back then, she was intimidated. She remembers group introductions when people shared stories about their background in art, and trips to Europe to see some of the most storied museums in the world.

“I’m thinking, ‘I went to the Portland museum several times,’” Bliven said. “Does that count?’” 

It did. She and her husband, Lee, started attending every session after that, with Susan Bliven for a time doing one watercolor painting every day. Issues with hand mobility have stopped her daily painting practice. However, she said that dementia patients tend to be isolated. 

But through the Connections sessions, her world has expanded. As she worked on her wood-slice ornament, a tree on a curved horizon line striped around the tree branch rings, she reflected on what the sessions have given her: a regular place to keep her cognitive skills sharp, the thrill of creating something new.

“I got back this part of me,” she said. “It gave me purpose.”

‘A part of her that’s still there’

It did the same for Claudia Gemmer, said her husband, Bob Gemmer.

She was always artistic, long before she started with the program. She carried a stubborn creative vision for the décor in the Gemmer home, one she guarded just as fiercely with her stained glass, fiber arts and jewelry.

But in the last few years of her life, she seemed different; what her family thought was anxiety turned out to be dementia. Along with Bob and one of their sons, Eric, she started attending the Connections sessions shortly after moving to Eugene in 2023.

For the year she was able to participate, he said he saw her able to express herself and make friends in the program, even as things changed.

He described seeing in the gallery sessions and in the art-making sessions; even as her ability to share or to make art directly declined, she did what she could. 

“It was sometimes frustrating for her, because what she wanted to do, she couldn’t get her hands to do,” he said. “There was a disconnect there, but there was still the community.”

She died Sept. 7, two months to the day before Bob Gemmer spoke about her life at the December session.

Bob Gemmer invited Lamont and Oakman to come to her funeral, but he wanted to attend the Community and Connections session to say goodbye again, in the art class community that gave his wife so much in her last years.

“I really think it’s an incredible program,” he said. “The whole idea that there’s a way to connect to your dear other, my wife, to connect to her, a part of her brain that is still working — the frontal lobe isn’t there anymore, but there’s a part of her that’s still there.” 

He has yet to decorate the house he lives in in Eugene. His wife’s things are a little too difficult for him to go through yet. But when he does feel ready, he has the perfect pieces to start with: the ornaments and paintings they worked on together.

How to sign up 

Reflections and Connections, the intensive five-week class, is limited to six people with their caretakers. Community and Connections, the monthly meetup, is limited to 12 with caretakers.

People interested in joining either session in 2026 should reach out to the the museum’s Art Heals program by emailing artheals@uoregon.edu, or calling 541-346-6443.