Tessa Windt

AZ Creative Aging Master Teaching Artist

I believe working with older adults is an opportunity to build confidence and connections between people, through the act of making. When we work creatively together we can bridge the isolation so many older adults face, creating a potent context in which each participant is a vital contributor with a great deal to give and receive.

Tessa Windt is a Master Teaching Artist of the AZ Creative Aging Teaching Artist Institute.

Artist Biography

Working creatively with aging Canadian war veterans in the mid-1990’s gave visual artist Tessa Windt the opportunity to learn firsthand the impact creative engagement can have on older adults. In 2009 she resumed her creative work with older adults with the project Parcel Post, a 6-site community-based project in which 60 older adults living across the state of North Carolina collaborated on 60 artworks.

This project solidified Windt’s commitment to working with older adults; since then she has worked with individuals aged 55 to 103, from active independent recent retirees to individuals facing physical and cognitive challenges, in settings as broad as senior centers, adult day centers, long-term care facilities, and arts venues; exploring the opportunities found within moments of creative engagement to build connection and address the isolation faced by many older adults.

In particular, since 2011, she has worked with the Mesa Arts Center on their Creative Aging Engagement program, developing and coordinating visual arts projects with older adults at several sites in Mesa including Oakwood Creative Care, a day club for older adults with cognitive and physical challenges. Projects commissioned by the Mesa Arts Center, including Hand Made Story Lab, Words of Wisdom, In-the-Round, View, In Common Hands, Entangle and Framework, reconsider formal abstraction in relation to layering of material, creative process and the stories elicited by the process of making.

In addition to her work with the Mesa Arts Center, since 2015 Windt has been the Artist-in-Residence for the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arts Engagement Program, a program for older adults with memory loss and their care partners. In 2016 she served as a mentor artist to the Teaching Artist Institute for the Arizona Commission on the Arts’ AZ Creative Aging Initiative, and facilitated a project at Sunset Library in Chandler through the Lifetime Arts Creative Aging in America’s Libraries project.

Photos:

(Left) Arts Engagement Program led by Tessa Windt, Phoenix Art Museum, 2016. Photo by Rebecca Albrecht, courtesy of Phoenix Art Museum.

(Right) Pick Your Favorite Color, by Blanca Silva, Viviana Mata, Danelle Fransen, Gloria Garcia, Janet Macumber, Rosa Felix, Grace Hiraki. Created during In-the-Round at Oakwood Creative Care, 2014, a project led by Tessa Windt, commissioned by the Mesa Arts Center. Photo by Tessa Windt.