Hattie Ide Chaffee Home’s Arts Academy featured on the front page of The Providence Journal

The Hattie Ide Chaffee Home’s Arts Academy was featured on the front page of The Providence Journal on September 29, 2026. In “Arts Revival,” reporter Jonny Williams and photographer Ryan T. Conaty captured a drama class in which residents used tambourines, shakers, and a billowing blue tarp to conjure a storm at sea, complete with a golden wish-granting fish. The story highlights how creativity, movement, and storytelling have become part of daily life at our East Providence home.

That drama class is just one piece of a much larger program. As the article explains, the academy also offers spoken poetry, sound baths, dance classes tailored for older adults, and even workshops in improvised clowning, all led by artists in residence: Julie Adams Strandberg, who taught arts and healing at Brown University; award-winning artist Cathryn Housley; Celtic and folk singer-songwriter Mary Pierce; and Barry Marshall, the longtime Moses Brown School drama teacher who guided residents through that stormy sea. The academy is the brainchild of our CEO, Barry Zeltzer, a clinical gerontologist who joined the home in 2021 and told the Journal that the arts are “inextricably connected to human well-being.” True to that belief, residents are participants and not just an audience: they are now preparing a theatrical performance and will make their own costumes for it. The Journal also spotlighted the academy’s intergenerational work, including “Circle of Light,” an 8-by-8-foot canvas created by our residents and children from Smith Hill Library under Housley’s direction and displayed in the Atrium Gallery at the State House. Thanks to grant support, academy programming is open to people outside the nursing home as well.

You can read the full article on the Providence Journal’s website: https://www.providencejournal.com/story/lifestyle/features/2026/09/28/nursing-home-in-rhode-island-turns-to-the-arts-for-well-being/91921149007/