Your path: Williams Opens Art Retreat
Lisa Williams Opens Art Retreat
Excerpt from an article by Tara Morgan in The Boise Weekly, March 26, 2008.
Behind a batiked door under the Infinity Wellness Center on 27th Street in Boise, Idaho, lies a lair known as Art Alley.
Lisa Williams, a professional art therapist at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center, opened Art Alley last July as a retreat for those she refers to as the "worried well."
"Every person in this world suffers from, at one point or another, sadness or depression or anxiety or stress," Williams explains.
So Williams decided to open an art space where overworked adults can reacquaint themselves with the recuperative powers of creativity.
Art therapy, Williams explains, shouldn't be seen as a Rorschach test for diagnosing mental illness, but rather as a tool to further discussion and communication. It requires people to be engaged in their treatment as active participants. Through creation, they are able to move from their analytical left brain to the more abstract right, and in the process, help uncover masked psychological issues.
Williams discovered that there was an unfulfilled niche in catering to the needs of the normal neurotic. She worked daily with the chronically mentally ill but felt there was an absence of preventative therapy being done for people like her.
"I wanted a place for someone like myself who's starving to go and do art and socialize and relax and laugh and do all those things that I forget, myself, to do because I get so busy," says Williams.
Art Alley is just that place.