At the CREATE Arts Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, students participate in Senior Arts Day. The Center was founded in 1986 by Holocaust survivor Tamar Hendel. It offers a variety of classes as well as art therapy for children and adults. Courtesy of CREATE Arts Center

• Share

PRINT

Though it was founded 35 years ago by a Holocaust survivor, the CREATE Arts Center in downtown Silver Spring has a mission that seems tailored for today: offering art classes and art therapy to foster creativity, connect community and boost mental health.

“My feeling was that the arts really belonged out there in the world for all people,” said its founder, Tamar Hendel, now 86. That includes everyone from “people who think of themselves as needing therapy and people who just want to try and see what it’s like doing the arts,” she said.

Hendel founded CREATE in 1986 “because she found art therapy tools to be helpful to her and her family, as survivors of the Holocaust,” said Linda Marson, its executive director.

Hendel was six years old when the Nazis entered Yugoslavia in 1941. She and her parents and older brother fled to Italy and then America.

“We survived in Italy for two years, under very positive conditions, because the Italians are very good, generous, giving people for the most part, even though there were [antisemitic] laws. We couldn’t go to school. My parents taught me to read and write,” Hendel told the Beacon.

Her family came to the U.S. in 1944 as part of a group of refugees from Italy. “A thousand of us [came] in a convoy of six American ships, a two-week voyage, [yet] the families had to sign that they would go back,” Hendel recalled.

Eventually Congress passed a bill during the Truman Administration allowing the refugees to stay. Hendel and her family settled in New York City with distant family members.

One of Hendel’s elementary school teachers inspired her interest in art, and Hendel eventually became an art teacher at George Washington University.

She later took art therapy classes at the university and found that those classes gave her a way to confront some of the experiences she had as a child during the Holocaust.

“That’s when I did a very large wood carving that expressed my fear as a child — running away, being pursued, being in danger, being afraid,” Hendel said.

Hendel established CREATE, originally located in Bethesda, to give others access to the same healing experience she had.

“Essentially what we’re doing is finding what’s good in the person, where the strength is,” Hendel said. “Where their beauty is. Where their humanity is.”

Pandemic pivot

As the pandemic enters its third year, everyone can benefit from art therapy. The nonprofit offers a program known as “COVID Art & Mindfulness: Coping with Pandemic Stress.”

The CREATE Arts Center recently expanded its programming, Marson said, to meet the community’s need for “artistic expression in the midst of a pandemic…the need to express yourself — your fears, your dreams, your expectations, your anxiety.”

Like most organizations, the center had to pivot to online classes after the pandemic shutdowns began in March 2020.

“We had our classes and workshops online, and we ran them very successfully, including a virtual summer camp,” Marson said.

One of the center’s most successful programs is smARTkids, a free after-school program provided at four public elementary schools in Montgomery County. According to Marson, smARTkids is for students from low-income households who are primarily English learners.

The program “aims to strengthen language and literacy skills and give these kids some of the emotional tools that they need to express themselves,” Marson said. During the pandemic, the center mailed art materials to kids at home, free of charge.

The center also has a program that offers respite for adults with mental health issues. For example, CREATE provides art therapy for adults with schizophrenia.

“It keeps them out of the hospital, many of them. And they know they’re here for art therapy,” Hendel said.

Embracing the artist moniker

The woman who spent a lifetime teaching art and art therapy is now retired but actively engaged in creating art herself from her home at the Riderwood Senior Living Community in Silver Spring.

“I did art [for many years], but I didn’t call myself an artist. Since I moved to Riderwood, I call myself an artist,” Hendel said.

One of her sculptures is displayed in the art gallery at the CREATE office.

Hendel said her late-in-life transition to artist is not surprising; after all, adults continue to grow and express themselves in new ways.

“We still have our humanity, and the need to say what we need to say.”

The CREATE Arts Center is located at 914 Silver Spring Ave., Silver Spring, MD. For more information and a schedule of classes, call (301) 588-ARTS (2787) or visit createartscenter.org.