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Student art program honors daughter’s memory

Got Art? program is inspired by teen’s battle with bipolar disorder

Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007

Click here to enlarge this photo J. Adam Fenster⁄The Gazette Potomac resident Kerry Malawista speaks to Walt Whitman High School art students Rachel Rickert, a junior, and Grace Beehler, a senior, about donating to Got Art? Malawista and her husband Alan Heilbron founded the program in their daughter Sarah’s memory to raise awareness about bipolar disorder and encourage the arts. Click here to enlarge this photo J. Adam Fenster⁄The Gazette Potomac residents Kerry Malawista and Alan Heilbron speak to art students at Walt Whitman High School. The program collects art donated by students and displays it in a refurbished school bus that will travel to school events.

In August, she committed suicide at the age of 18 after suffering from bipolar disorder.

Now her mother, Kerry Malawista, and stepfather, Alan Heilbron, have created Got Art? in her memory as a way to encourage artistic students and to raise awareness about bipolar disorder.

‘‘It’s a way to take our grief and put it into something productive and hopeful and honor Sarah in a positive way,” Malawista said.

The program will showcase and sell art donated mostly by high school and college students and it will be displayed in a refurbished school bus that will be covered with Sarah Malawista’s digitized paintings.

The bus will travel to school events, such as plays and sporting events, as a way to keep the program student-themed.

All of the money Got Art? raises from sales will go to bipolar awareness and research programs. Art work will include paintings, sculpture, jewelry, photography and other forms.

Although Heilbron spoke with Sarah about starting a similar program, they never got the chance. But in September, a month after her death, that’s when Heilbron and Sarah’s mother decided to start Got Art?. They are currently in the process of raising money, collecting art and having the bus converted into a mobile gallery.

Malawista and Heilbron are now encouraging students to donate their art by talking to art classes at schools, including Walt Whitman High School, where their daughter attended through her sophomore year until transferring to the Edmund Burke School in Washington, D.C.

‘‘[Got Art? is] definitely something she would have been proud of and volunteered to work on if we went to her classroom,” Heilbron said.

They spoke to Whitman art classes on Friday and plan to speak at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac on Jan. 19.

‘‘I think it’s a great connection for the students to make to the community,” said Robert Burgess, Walt Whitman High School art teacher. ‘‘It’s good experience for the students to be able to include their art work in a traveling exhibit.”

The couple has already received more than 20 art pieces for the mobile gallery and $50,000 in donations.

‘‘I think it’s a great [idea],” said Anna Finch, a junior at Whitman who plans to donate her work. ‘‘I hope that it works; that it raises money and it raises awareness.”

The bus will be outfitted with video equipment that will show a movie about bipolar disorder directed toward teens.

‘‘It will help people who have the disease get treatment and help them deal with it,” Heilbron said. ‘‘We’re hoping to make a tiny dent in that particular problem.”

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a brain disorder that is categorized by extreme emotional highs and lows, in which the person will have mood swings from high-energy mania to intense depression and loss of energy.

‘‘Bipolar is very prevalent in very highly creative people in the arts so it seemed like a very natural fit and that’s what Sarah loved the most,” Malawista said.

Psychologists are just beginning to understand the connection between bipolar disorder and creativity, according to Jim Potash, co-director of the mood disorders program at Johns Hopkins University, which Malawista hopes to donate to with money raised by Got Art?

‘‘There is a depth of emotion and a level of struggle that comes out of depression,” Potash said.

While the rapid speed of thought during manic episodes causes a person to make more connections in their brain inspiring creativity, he added.

Several well-known creative people, including Vincent Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Walt Whitman had bipolar disorder.

Although the disorder inspires a level of genius, it is also an unsettling illness that many people, despite available medication, can’t live with, according to Potash.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, the rate of suicides among people with bipolar disorder is 10 percent to 15 percent of the 2 million adults who have the disorder in the United States.

‘‘Part of our goal is to put it out there and say this is an illness that needs attention,” Malawista said.

Malawista and Heilbron hope the bus will be finished by May so the program can get started. Their future goal is to expand it to other places around the country and to have a Got Art? club in schools where students can get community service hours for their work.

‘‘On several levels I think this is an extraordinary way to pay it forward,” said Whitman AP art teacher Jean Diamond. ‘‘If that child couldn’t be helped, then how nice it is to disseminate knowledge and do it in a creative way.”