Young patients at Advocate Children’s Hospital in Oak Lawn soon will enjoy painting, drawing and playing instruments in a newly created studio.
“I am really excited because it will change how I practice with some of my patients,” said hospital art therapist Lori Mackey.
Being able to get out of their rooms will help “normalize” the children’ hospital experience, Mackey said. Rather than be simply a patient, they can be artists as well.
“Doctors and nurses are welcome to come in and create art with them,” Mackey said, “but no medical treatment will occur in the studio.”
The Creative Arts Therapy Studio was an idea and gift from an Orland Park woman who wanted to honor her mother, who embraced both children and creativity.
Supporting art therapy for kids at the hospital near where her mother, Grace Ann Giobbia, raised her six children in Oak Lawn seemed a fitting way to honor her, said her daughter, Dina Giobbia-Stukel.
“She had a special place in her heart for children who needed a helping hand,” Giobbia-Stukel said.
When she contacted hospital staff last year, she said she was adamant she wanted to do more than donate funds to the existing arts therapy program.
For more than 10 years, the children’s hospital has offered its patients art and music therapy. Such therapy has been shown to help children and families coping with illness and hospitalization communicate feelings that may be hard to express in words, Mackey said.
Expressing these feelings can help reduce patients’ stress, improve their moods and give them a sense of control in a situation where they may not feel like they have any, hospital officials said. Music therapy also is used for pain management, Mackey said.
The therapists are accustomed to carrying art supplies or musical instruments to a patient’s room and working with the child bedside or in the teen room.
“It’s a lot of back and forth to the storage closet,” Mackey said.
Giobbia-Stukel wanted the children to be able to leave their rooms and the medical equipment behind and have a separate place to be creative.
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“Kids really want to change their space even for 15 minutes,” Giobbia-Stukel said. “And my mom was a big believer in if you change your scenery, you can look at things from a different perspective.”
In fact, when the family moved to New Lenox, Grace Ann Giobbia set up a craft room in her home, where she did her own art and encouraged first her children, their friends, her nieces and nephews, and then her grandchildren to join her.
Her mother was “100% creative,” Giobbia-Stukel said, selling a variety of sewn items, baskets and other holiday decorations she made at craft fairs, co-owning a ceramics store with her sister, and even having a kiln in her craft room at home.
“My mom was great with kids. She knew how to talk to kids of all ages from little children to teenagers,” Giobbia-Stukel said.
Advocate’s art therapists embraced the idea of giving hospitalized children time in a “medical-free” environment.
It gives them something to look forward to amid the challenges of undergoing treatment, Mackey said.
And in the new studio, “they are not limited by space, they are not limited by supplies,” she said. “Patients can work large.”
There’s room for two or three children at a time in the “cozy” studio, Mackey said.
“I have a couple of patients who met while they were hospitalized,” she said.
If they like, Mackey can bring them together to the studio for their art therapy.
“That will decrease their isolation and increase socialization for them,” she said.
Lobby space on the hospital’s fourth floor was converted to make room for the studio, which has two tables, a window, a bathroom and magnetic walls to hold containers of supplies and display the children’s artwork.
But the studio is not a drop-in playroom, where parents and children could come at will. They must be accompanied by one of the hospital’s board certified and specially trained art and music therapists, Mackey said.
The children are always given a choice of whether they want to participate in creative arts therapy.
“Most want to do art,” she said.
When her mother died in 2005, Giobbia-Stukel, who is the youngest of her mother’s six children, was just starting her own family with a 1-year-old son. She realized as her son and his younger brother grew, they never got to know and play with their grandmother the way her siblings’ children did.
Creating the art studio at the hospital was a way they could appreciate her love of children and the arts and preserve her legacy.
Giobbia-Stukel was thrilled with how the studio turned out. Everything she envisioned was covered and more.
“This is what I was hoping for and we got it,” she said.
Donations to support arts therapy in the studio at Advocate Children’s Hospital can be made online through the Advocate Health Care Charitable Foundation.
Kimberly Fornek is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
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