She was saved by art.
Now abuse-survivor Linda Litteral is sharing the healing power
of creativity to save others, too
BY KARLA PETERSON COLUMNIST, SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE
Healing takes time. For Linda Litteral, that time was measured in the decades it took for her transformative journey to begin.
Her road to the better place she’s in now was built on clay and wood; oil and acrylics; and pen, pencil and paper. It was built on the art that helped her heal from years of being sexually abused by her maternal grandfather.
Litteral is sure that art saved her, and she has no intention of keeping that lifeline to herself.
“As an incest survivor, art was how I was able to begin my healing process. I am really drawn to this idea of using art to heal,” said the Santee artist, who received her Master of Fine Arts degree from San Diego State and her Art 4 Healing certificate from Brandman University (now Art & Creativity for Healing) in Laguna Hills.
Photo courtesy of Sandy Huffaker
“I’m not a therapist. I just like to help people bring out whatever they need to in their art.”
Since 2015, Litteral has been a visiting artist at the Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility, where her class offerings include the Healing Art Process, which helps participants connect with and release difficult emotions through the process of making art.
Through the San Diego-based Project PAINT, Litteral brought the Healing Art Process class to the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in 2018. And earlier this year, Litteral worked with students at Crawford High School in El Cerrito, where she joined art teacher Brian Black to present a nine-week series of ceramics and design workshops that tapped into the restorative power of creating.
Funded by a grant from Space 4 Art, the East Village-based artists’ collective and community arts space where she has her studio, Litteral taught students how to use color to express whatever emotions they were feeling at the moment. From there, she worked with them to make ceramic tiles reflecting their healing colors.
Together, Litteral and the students produced more than 700 tiles, which were recently installed on benches that will act as a safe space on campus.
The benches will have their moment in the spotlight during the Crawford High School Arts Celebration on May 25. But for Litteral, the celebrating really began as soon as the students let their true colors come to the surface.
“I think they thought I was a little nuts at the beginning. It was like, ‘What is this woman going on about?’” said the 67-year-old artist, who has taught at SDSU, Mesa College, Miramar College, Grossmont College and Southwestern College.
“But a lot of them really focused on what colors came up for them. Watching them do the process, you could tell that they were trying hard to see what they needed to see to put what they wanted to put on the tiles.”
Litteral was abused by her grandfather for eight years, beginning when she was 3. She never talked about it, but the trauma was there just the same. It wasn’t until she landed in a ceramics class in Charleston, S.C. at the age of 39 that she found a way to bring some light into that buried place.
“It was like my hands knew the clay already, somehow. I had never had an art class before in my life, and I was just doing stuff I had no idea I had the capacity for. It was very magical,” said Litteral, who had been trained in drafting, design and engineering before she began her artistic career.
“When we (Litteral, husband Lance Reynolds and her daughter) moved to Maine about a year later, that’s when I started doing self-work like therapy and searching for modalities that would make me feel better. It opened me up enough to get me speaking about what happened to me.”
Since getting her master’s degree in 2003, Litteral has had solo exhibitions at galleries in San Diego, Twentynine Palms and Klamath Falls, Ore. She has been included in dozens of invitational exhibitions all over San Diego County, as well as two exhibitions in Twentynine Palms and two in Sweden. Her work — which includes paintings, sculptures, drawings and wood pieces — cuts a wide swath, too.
In her “Storytellers” collection, Litteral sculpts partial heads and busts whose interior surfaces reveal frightening secrets in the form of cracked ceramic houses or scrawled drawings of monsters and crying children. One bust is surrounded by cascading piles of children’s books.
Her “Armor” collection features torsos made out of ceramic or metal leaves representing the childhood refuge she found in nature. In “See, Hear, Speak,” Litteral creates ceramic sculptures studded with the sightless eyes, closed ears and stifled mouths that marked her years abuse.
And in her latest project, which is still in the works, Litteral is writing a memoir that takes the form of a conversation about her life and her art.
The memoir discusses her battles with drugs and alcohol, her struggles with guilt and shame, and the pain of feeling invisible when she desperately needed to be seen. It will be illustrated with images of her artwork and the artist’s explanations of how the pieces came to be.
The title is “Show and Tell: Art, Healing, Incest,” and like Litteral’s art, it speaks to the power of art to liberate us from the awful burden of silence.
“Art really does allow you to say what you need to say in a way that you can’t say with words,” Litteral said. “Art gave me my words.”
Linda Litteral will be among the artists showing their work during Space 4 Art’s Open Studios on June 17. The free event starts at 7 p.m. RSVP’s are suggested. Go to sdspace4art.org for information.