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Leah Ra'Chel Gipson

Associate Professor

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Bio

Associate Professor (2016– ) SAIC Department of Art Therapy and Counseling Department. Chair (2022–2023), Program Director (2018–2021). Education: BFA, 2007, University of Central Florida; MAAT, 2010, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; MTS, 2018, McCormick Theological Seminary.

Courses: Cultural Dimensions in Art Therapy; Historical and Theoretical Perspectives in Art Therapy and Counseling; Psychoanalytic and Anthropological Perspectives on Art and Childhood; Black Rage: Interpreting Feeling in Anti-Slavery Imagery; Materials and Media in Art Therapy; Researching Art and Change on the West Side of Chicago; Explorations in Community-Based Art Practices; Community Practice and Helping Relationships (formerly Creative Healing Praxis and Blackness); Art Therapy Fieldwork; Ethics and Legal Issues in Art Therapy

Awards

Sisters in Cinema Fellowship, 2025–2026; National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Grant Awarded through Rebuild Bay County, 2024; Creative Capital, 2023; Visiting Professor, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, 2018–2020; Propeller Fund Awardee, 2016; Community Engagement Fellow McCormick Theological Seminary, 2014–2017; DCASE Chicago Artists Month Featured Artist, 2014.

Publications

Wiltshire, I., Gipson, L., Shi, Y. (Forthcoming). Chapter in F. Johnston, A. Morehead, & I. Wiltshire (Eds.). Confabulations: Art & the Critical Medical Humanities. Bloomsbury Academic.

Gipson, L. (2024). "Georgette Seabrooke Powell and the legacy of Harlem in art therapy." In T. Sheehan & S. Hudson (Eds.), Modernism, Art, Therapy. Yale University Press.

Reinhardt, R., & Gipson, L. (2023). "Against diagnosing the spirit: A Note on the Clinic of Spirit Possession." Penumbr(a) A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Modernity.

Norris, M., Williams, B. Leah Gipson (Ed.). (2021). "Black aesthetics and the arts therapies." Special Multidisciplinary Issue. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 21(1). https://voices.no/index.php/voices/issue/view/422. 

Gipson, L. (2019). "Envisioning black women’s consciousness in art therapy." In S.K. Talwar (Ed.), (2019). Art therapy for social justice: Radical intersections. Routledge.

Exhibitions & Art Facilitations

Black Girlhood Altar, Chicago Cultural Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago, IL; She Asked Her Mother, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; Participatory Arts: Crafting Social Change at Hull-House Museum, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Chicago, IL; Barbershop Talk: Black Eutopia, at Carter's Barbershop, Chicago, IL, October 18, 2014. Press: "The Artist as a Catalyst of Social Change?" Part 3: Leah Gipson, Sixty Inches from Center; "West Side Artists Talk Gentrification," Austin Weekly News, Tuesday, December 5, 2017.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course is designed to offer students a didactic and experiential overview of the field of art therapy. Material covered will include history, theory, and practice of art therapy processes and approaches as well as a survey of populations, settings, and applications. Lecture, readings, discussion, audio-visual presentations, experiential exercises, and guest presentations comprise the structure of this course.

Class Number

1114

Credits

3

Description

This course explores the intersections between psychoanalysis, anthropology, art and childhood, emphasizing common ideas, concepts, techniques and methods across disciplines. The course consists of both theoretical and practical elements. Historical and contemporary ideas on art and human development are explored from multiple theoretical perspectives and interpretations of childhood. In the realm of the practical, students develop and implement collaborative art and ethnography projects guided by shared inquiries, and in opposition to dominant, totalizing narratives.

Class Number

1152

Credits

3

Description

This course aims to critically examine the affects of race and representation of others. Students will interpret nineteenth-century and early 20th-century material and non-material culture from anti-slavery and pro-slavery sources, including biblical literature, slave narratives, print media, music, visual art, and ephemera. The course considers moral motivations for recognition, empathy, assistance, and liberation of others in an era of sentimentalism. Students will interrogate modern ideas in helping relationships as they learn to 1.) explore the role of cultural materials in preserving trauma or the history of violence; 2.) discuss the role of cultural imagery in the production of charity and empathy; and 3.) ask contemporary questions about the role of desire in feeling responsibility and doing good. Throughout the course, students will be required to travel to several local archives including the Newberry Library and the Stony Island Arts Bank for research.

Class Number

1005

Credits

3

Description

This course aims to critically examine the affects of race and representation of others. Students will interpret nineteenth-century and early 20th-century material and non-material culture from anti-slavery and pro-slavery sources, including biblical literature, slave narratives, print media, music, visual art, and ephemera. The course considers moral motivations for recognition, empathy, assistance, and liberation of others in an era of sentimentalism. Students will interrogate modern ideas in helping relationships as they learn to 1.) explore the role of cultural materials in preserving trauma or the history of violence; 2.) discuss the role of cultural imagery in the production of charity and empathy; and 3.) ask contemporary questions about the role of desire in feeling responsibility and doing good. Throughout the course, students will be required to travel to several local archives including the Newberry Library and the Stony Island Arts Bank for research.

Class Number

1115

Credits

3

Description

This course investigates psychological, sociological, cognitive, cultural and neurobiological approaches to human development. Historical and current theories are examined in light of the implications they have for art therapy theory and practice. Course content addresses the role of the cultural production of personal experience in lifelong development, including how issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, disability and sexual orientation relate to human development.

Class Number

1951

Credits

3