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Ongoing Personal Essay: Tuft.

Above are portions of a video essay in which I explore my connection to my great great uncle Boris Blai’s pioneering role in advancing art therapy in the 1940’s.

Boris was a sculptor working in Philadelphia when he befriended Stella Elkins Tyler, a wealthy heiress of a Gilded-Age fortune. Tyler privately suffered from schizophrenia and manic depression.

Boris taught Mrs. Tyler to sculpt which she attributed to saving her from a nervous breakdown.

He went on to found the Tyler School of Art at Temple University with the promise of furthering art therapy.

“One reason so many of us are despondent , worried, jittery, today, is that we are using our heads too much and our hands too little…when a man lets (his hands) grow useless and clumsy, he is trying to buck nature — and he pays with neuroses.” wrote Boris in an article for The American Magazine published in 1940.

I am simultaneously documenting my journey towards healing my mental health through a fiber art practice called tufting.