Barbara Wiener, a Minneapolis filmmaker, has always known the power of storymaking to change the world. As founder of TVbyGIRLS, she made it her mission to provide girls with the skill, leadership, and resilience to thrive and make change in a world where women’s voices weren’t heard. The impact of Barbara’s work had a ripple effect–the girls who participated in TVbyGIRLS are now storytellers, leaders and change-makers. Today, many organizations continue TVbyGIRLS’s work to empower youth through media. But as Barbara entered her sixties, she began to notice something strange–though she had become older, wiser, and more resilient with every passing year, the world seemed to see her less and less. She began to feel…well… invisible. She realized that the same challenges faced by adolescent girls were also being faced by elders. 

 

Then, in 2020, the world as we knew it turned upside down. With the COVID-19 pandemic lurking around every corner, our everyday lives came to a sudden standstill–outings with friends, gatherings with family, and even trips to the grocery store were suddenly risky endeavors. We all had to adjust to spending more time at home and less time with each other, but older adults, who were at especially-high risk for getting sick, were hit particularly hard. Concerned about the social isolation that older adults were facing as a result of the pandemic, on top of the lack of invisibility they were already facing, Barbara called on her friend and fellow artist, Leah Gross, to find a way to help. Together, Leah and Barbara developed Adventures in Visual Storytelling–a virtual, Zoom-based workshop filled with exercises and experiments in visual storymaking designed to evoke a sense of connection and aliveness while encouraging students to tell their unique stories. Drawing inspiration from the artist and educator Lynda Barry, Barbara and Leah studied the importance of play in creativity, and designed the curriculum to not only be educational, but playful. 

 

Barbara and Leah taught their first few classes at FilmNorth, a Minneapolis arts organization, and soon saw that the class had broad potential even after the first wave of the pandemic was over. Now that the virtual world is part of our everyday experience, Barbara and Leah continue to present Adventures in Visual Storytelling virtually, continually updating the workshop to adapt to the challenges of aging in a rapidly-changing world. Students are challenged and supported in taking creative risks, sharing their experience through exercises in a variety of mediums including film, cartooning, and even stop-motion animation. In generating work from memory as well as current experience, we aim to help participants unlock their innate vitality and resilience through community and art-making.