More Than A Thousand Words

Making art, one of our most powerful modes of communication, allows us to express ourselves in deeply personal ways. We lay bare our experiences, ideas, and feelings through images and objects. We reveal the unseen or unknown aspects of who we are as we share our stories.

More Than a Thousand Words features work by ten renowned and newly emerging artists who have practiced at Oaklands’s Creative Growth Art Center. Founded in 1974, Creative Growth is a leader in the field of arts and disabilities. Their work has established a model for a creative community guided by the principle that art is fundamental to human expression and that all people are entitled to its tools of communication.

Creative Growth opens its studios to hundreds of artists, many of whom have developed highly nuanced and sophisticated artistic practices over decades of work. Today these artists, who have long been marginalized, are finally receiving recognition for their place in the larger field of contemporary art.

From Judith Scott’s cocoon-like bundles of wrapped objects to Dan Miller’s bold compositions of obsessively layered text, these artists’ works tell the compelling stories of our contemporary world. Across our diverse life experiences, art is the shared language that connects us all.