Mary Langenfeld
“We’re not asking people ‘do you remember?’ We’re just trying to start a conversation,” says Katie Shapiro, about her work with people experiencing memory loss.
First, there’s the knocking sound of a pair of claves that evokes someone chopping wood. Then, a stick going up and down a guiro mimics the sound of a saw moving its way across a log.
Strangers at the Wisconsin Historical Museum fall into the rhythms of a lumber camp. Some have a percussion instrument, some just tap their toes or nod their head. All attention is on the sounds at hand in this corner of the exhibition space on the museum’s third floor.
“Music is very powerful,” Katie Shapiro, program and special events coordinator at the Wisconsin Historical Museum, later explains. “Rhythm stays with people for a long time.”
On this Monday, a day the facility is usually closed, music is a small part of the museum’s regular Spark! program, a monthly event for older adults with memory loss and their care partners.
The Historical Museum and the Madison Children’s Museum regularly offer Spark! programming as part of an alliance that began in 2009 and has expanded to 21 members in Wisconsin and Minnesota. The twice-monthly Children’s Museum programming is primarily art-based, both making and discussing, while the Historical Museum taps into history to evoke participant storytelling.
“We’re not asking people, ‘Do you remember?’ We’re just trying to start a conversation,” says Shapiro, who uses objects from the museum’s teaching collection to guide the discussion. “We did a program about home life and we had things like old curling irons and people told stories like, ‘Oh my brother would pull one of those out and chase me around the living room.’”
As participants learn about the lumberjacks, Shapiro orchestrates conversations, which range from the hard life of growing up on a farm to tales of Norwegian ancestors who settled in Wisconsin. The discussion is also peppered with seemingly random thoughts.
“I have a dog!” says one participant, as Shapiro talks about lumbering legends near the museum display.
“I bet Paul Bunyan loved his blue ox the way you love your dog,” responds Shapiro, whose training included work with programming and memory loss.
The Spark! program is modeled after Meet Me at MoMA, a monthly program at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Angela Johnson, who coordinates Spark! for the Madison Children’s Museum, trained at the MoMA program prior to the Madison launch in October 2010.
“We don’t have Jackson Pollocks on our walls to look at, so I built up a collection of prints and objects,” she says. “We start the conversation by asking, ‘What do you see? How does that make you feel?’ It might take people back to a different point in their lives when they were kids, and maybe it doesn’t.”
Johnson once showed the group a Winslow Homer print of a fisherman on his boat trying to outrun a storm. It turned out several of the men in the group had been in the Navy.
“They talked about the directionality of the clouds and where the sun was in the sky and what time of day it might have been,” Johnson says. “It was about a 10-minute conversation that was really interesting.”
Children’s Museum’s Spark! programming this year will include trips to the Watrous Gallery in the Overture Center. The Historical Museum’s will include a pizza-making lesson and party with staff from nearby Ian’s Pizza, short films from the Wisconsin Center for Film and Research, and a holiday party in December.
Spark! is one of several dementia initiatives in Dane County. There is also the Music & Memory program at eight Madison Public Library locations that provides personalized music playlists for people living with dementia and 12 Memory Café locations in the county that provide social opportunities for those with dementia and their care partners.
Spark! is quality time for the participants, but Johnson appreciates what the program has meant for her, too.
“It’s sort of best practices for being kind,” she says, “for being able to engage people and to focus on living in the moment.”
Spark! events are free, but registration is required. For the Children’s Museum, call 256-6445 ext. 156. For the Historical Museum call 261-9359, email Kaitlyn.shapiro@wisconsinhistory.org.
110,000: Estimated number of Wisconsin residents with dementia. The number is projected to rise to 130,000 by 2025.
16 million: People in the U.S. providing unpaid care for people with dementia, at an estimated amount of 18.4 billion hours.
$341,840: Estimated 2017 care costs per person with dementia.
34: Percentage of caregivers who are older than 65.
67: Percentage of caregivers who are women, with one-third of those being daughters.
Sources: ADRC of Dane County, the Alzheimer’s Association
Editor's note: This article has been updated to give the correct first name of Angela Johnson. It also incorrectly stated that the Watrous Gallery is in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. It is in the Overture Center.
