Other studies have shown that people with Alzheimer’s are able to rank their favorite colors, demonstrate esthetic preferences, and make associations between painted and real objects long after other kinds of memory recede. Research by the Ad Arte project in Naples, Italy, has demonstrated that exploring art encourages patients to speak and increases their self-esteem. Nobody’s sick, nobody’s different,” is how Kara Berringer, an art therapist at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum, explains the benefits of the program. It’s all about the art, and they can all connect to that. “The beautiful part of the program is that nobody mentions the word dementia. And participants in art tours don’t feel that they must already know something or that they will be expected to remember dates, names, or information. According to Anne Basting, director of the Center on Age and Community at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, art can trigger the emotional memory that often remains strong in Alzheimer’s patients, and can give them access to other memories as well. Visual art is particularly well suited to helping Alzheimer’s patients, research has found.

About 5 million Americans are currently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Each patient experiences a different progression of the disease, he explained, and each patient deserves to be seen as a “whole person living with dementia” who needs companionship, conversation, and stimulation. “I need to be enabled, not disabled,” he said. Keynote speaker Richard Taylor, a Texas psychologist who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s eight years ago, at the age of 58, urged the audience to stop thinking of Alzheimer’s as a death sentence and to see it like any other chronic condition. Museum educators from as close as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as far away as Oslo and Tokyo gathered to hear neurologists, teachers, and Alzheimer’s sufferers themselves discuss the disease and how an involvement with art can improve the quality of life for many patients and their caregivers. In late March, more than 100 experts in Alzheimer’s programming met at MoMA for a daylong summit. A third MetLife gift, earlier this year, will underwrite yet more training. A second grant of $400,000 two years later funded an outreach effort that saw MoMA educators visiting institutions around the world to train museum professionals, caregivers, teachers, and health-care providers. In 2007, the MetLife Foundation awarded Rosenberg and her team a $450,000 grant to develop an arts-and-dementia program that could be adopted by other institutions. MoMA’s pioneering work with the Alzheimer’s population began in 2006 with a pilot program at a nursing home, developed by Francesca Rosenberg, director of the education department’s Community, Access, and School programs. Part of the museum’s broader effort to reach diverse and underserved audiences-such as people with vision, hearing, physical, or developmental disabilities-the “Meet Me at MoMA” tours give people with dementia and their caregivers a chance to enjoy modern art. Had other visitors passed this group, they might not have guessed that the participants had something in common in addition to the their ages: Alzheimer’s. “Look at all that white.” And a fourth participant offered up the ditty: “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away.” “No! It’s set in winter,” protested another. “But it’s beautiful chaos.” When Broussard wondered aloud why Mitchell had titled the picture Ladybug, another member of the group suggested that it captured the spirit of spring. Kirstin Broussard, a guide at the Museum of Modern Art, gathered a dozen senior citizens in front of Joan Mitchell’s exuberant 1957 painting Ladybug one recent afternoon to discuss the luscious blue, green, and orange slashes animating the large expanse of white canvas.

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