Noah Hass-Cohen Remembers Shirley Riley

In Loving Memory of Shirley Riley, Phillips Graduate Institute Progress Journal, September 26, 2004

Shirley Riley MA, ATR-HLM, LMFT, was a wife, mother of four sons, grandmother and a beloved teacher, supervisor and mentor. She will be especially missed at Phillips Graduate Institute where she was a faculty member in the Masters of Arts Program in Psychology, Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) and Art Therapy since the programs’ inception in 1999, until her passing on September 13, 2004. There are multiple, significant ways in which Shirley Riley has impacted the art therapy field: that of teacher, supervisor, national and international presenter, public figure, clinician and respected author.

Shirley was a gifted and stimulating presenter and teacher. She applied innovative approaches to teaching, and was always at the forefront developing art therapy approaches, specialties and new epistemologies in the human sciences. She provided more than two decades of service and education to students and future art therapists at Immaculate Heart and Loyola Marymount University (LMU), Clinical Art Therapy/ Marriage and Family Therapy, and was also a frequent guest faculty at art therapy programs throughout the United States. Most recently she taught MFT graduate courses and classes at Pepperdine University, and was a regular visiting faculty at the art therapy program of New York University and the British Colombia School of Art Therapy where she taught family art therapy courses.

Shirley was a regular presenter throughout Asia and Europe. She was invited repeatedly to present in the Netherlands, Korea and Japan and throughout the United States. She also presented at major national conferences and was often part of the main panel of presenters. Her presentations were extremely well received. Through her travels and vast relationships, she promoted art therapy conversations, exchange and communication.

Shirley’s service to the national American Art Therapy Association (AATA) was outstanding. In recognition of this service and her contributions to the field, she received the Honorary Life Membership from the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) in 2000. Her many contributions included serving on the AATA Board where she was the Board Liaison for the Education Committees, on the Educational Program Approval Board and as an active member of the Art Therapy Journal Editorial Board. She chaired the long-range Planning Committee and was a member of the Nominating Committee as well as serving on multiple other committees. In these roles, she helped shape educational standards for art therapy programs to include multicultural and diversity training, and facilitated the development of art therapy educational standards to match and exceed existing mental health education, training, supervision and clinical trends and standards throughout the United States.

Shirley was the recipient of the AATA 1990 Clinical award for outstanding contributions to working with families. She had worked at the Didi Hirsch Mental Health Clinic for 18 years and she introduced family art therapy there. This was an achievement in and of itself, and she trained many LMU art therapy students at Didi Hirsch over the course of many years. Up to the time of her passing she consulted and supervised for OPICA, a West Los Angeles organization are directed toward providing meaningful and diverse daily programs for those suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease or other dementia, Parkinson’s Disease, stroke or depression. There she trained many Philips Graduate Institute art therapy students and graduates. Shirley also volunteered supervision at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and co-created a support group model for the Grossman Burn Center in Sherman Oaks, where she had provided services to children and their families. The breadth and depth of her clinical service was truly remarkable. Shirley considered herself fortunate and privileged to offer service to persons of all ages, color and social status, and she documented and explained her work both in presentations and writing.

Shirley published extensively in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association and in the Arts in Psychotherapy, the Journal of Korean Art Therapy, and the journals of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (AAMFT) and the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) as well as in professional publications and journals in allied fields. She co-authored Integrated Approaches to Family Art Therapy and Supervision and Related Issues and authored Contemporary Art Therapy with Adolescents and Group Process Made Visible. These continue to be required textbooks for many courses nationwide.

Shirley Riley made endless, major contributions to the field of art therapy, and her passing is a profound loss to the art therapy community. She will be missed tremendously by our community, and her teachings will not be forgotten as they continue to inform current and future students and practitioners.

Celebration of Shirley Riley's Life, Phillips Graduate Institute, September 25, 2005

My name is Noah Hass-Cohen and I first want to offer my heartfelt condolences to Grant, Craig, Neal, and Dale and their families and children. I was fortunate to be one of the many people Shirley considered her friend and it is from a place of great sadness that I am speaking to you today. We, Shirley’s friends, colleagues, and students want her family and the world to know how much we love and admire her. She was elegant, beautiful, gracious, wise and caring and I feel privileged to have had her in my life. It is so hard to accept that she is gone. It seems as if just yesterday I was her student and I painfully know that it was just yesterday that she was a teaching faculty in our department. It was just yesterday, two weeks ago Monday that I was at her bedside and she was doing well and instructing me on how to take care of the first year students until she returned in the Spring.

I first met Shirley, in 1991 at Loyola Marymount. I felt an immediate kinship with my new teacher and we became very close. She was a slender figure, decked in luminous Italian gold, which she had acquired on her many boat trips to Europe with her late husband Champ and dressed in beautiful outfits. She positively glowed, as she taught us about opportunities for change and shared with me her strong positive outlook on life. Shirley believed that people could change and she dedicated her life’s work to exploring art therapy as a change oriented approach. She not only practiced this approach with her clients but also wrote about it. By the time I met Shirley she had already written numerous articles, I think she wrote about 16 articles in all, and myself as well and others were encouraging her she was debating but I’d like to think that I played some small part in her decision to compile her writing into books. She debated on whether or not she had anything new to add in form of books and I argued that the appropriate testimony to her knowledge needed to bounded. This was partially because I was so tired of running photocopies of her articles. We celebrated when her books came out.

Shirley was the teacher and author who kindled my life long love for learning and satisfied my intellectual curiosity and I’d like to think that this legacy is what I have learned from her to instill in my students as well. As my supervisor, Shirley was my sounding board for new ideas about art therapy and about what we later started calling relational art therapy neuroscience practices. She was an amazingly courageous and open person and mentor since she not only taught me but allowed me and others to teach her. Later in 1991 we started teaching together at Philips. It is thanks to Shirley that the art therapy program exists at Philips. One cold day in December 1998 she called me and said: They are looking for a marriage family therapy faculty at a school called Philips. You should apply, that’s my vision for you dear. There were so many times that I did what Shirley’s plan was for me. Professionally as well as personally since she did not hesitate to frequently bestow on me child raising tips and marital advice. In my minds eye I can see her little knowing smile and she would probably say now as she often said to me in our daily evening freeway cell phone calls: “oh deary don’t be so serious about this. You are always too serious, it’s going to work out as things always do”. At Philips it was a paradoxical situation: Me as a program director, and she as faculty. Shirley loved Phillips, she often told me how much she admired the unique learning environment that we have. We negotiated a different, new, relationship and she of course delighted in letting me deal with administration while she was doing what she loved most - teaching and being there for faculty and for students. As usual with Shirley she got the better deal. We had many good times together in the last years but perhaps one of the very best times was the celebration of her 2000 Honorary Life Membership from the American Art Therapy Association award in March of 2001. It was wonderful to see her so happy; Her beloved art therapy community around her together with her family and friends.

Shirley touched our lives in so many ways and through us she touched the lives of hundreds of clients - children, women and families. Just imagine the sheer number of lives that she impacted. So many more than could possibly fit in this lovely space. To all of us she always said: “Yes you can do it, or why not, deary? Let’s see what we can do” She believed in each and every one of us….. Shirley we will miss you but we will not forget your tremendous faith in us and we want to thank you for the many gifts that you gave us.