Background on Elders Share the Arts

Elders Share the Arts (ESTA) was a community arts organization founded in 1979 by Susan Perlstein. Based in New York City, ESTA programs combined arts with oral history, life review, reminiscence theory, and intergenerational arts. Programs included Pearls of Wisdom, Legacy Arts, Living history, and Arts and Memory.

ESTA began as a single living-history theater workshop at the Hodson Senior Center in the South Bronx and then spread to other senior centers in New York City. The original living-history theater workshop laid the groundwork for Pearls of Wisdom, a touring ensemble of elder storytellers who use material from their own lives in their performances.

ESTA expanded their living history programs to include other art forms including theater, murals, collage, writing, photography, and dance. ESTA worked with senior, youth, and cultural institutions in the greater New York City area to form partnerships that provide intergenerational arts programs. Intergenerational programs partnered children and youth with the elderly. Participants in these programs shared their stories with each other and then transformed them into original works of art. Living History theater programs translated the stories into plays or drama while Legacy Works transformed the stories into paintings, collages, murals, writings, photography, mixed media, and other non-performing art forms.

As a pioneer in the field of creative aging and worked to educate and train others in the field of creative aging, Elders Share the Arts worked diligently to train administrators, artists, educators, social workers, students, seniors, therapists, gerontologists, and volunteers in the skills required to create oral history and arts programs for seniors. They were instrumental too in founding the National Center for Creative Aging (NCCA), an advocacy, policy, and networking organization, established by Susan Perlstein as an ESTA program in 2001 through a partnership with the National Council on Aging (NCOA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). NCCA became an independent non-profit based out of Washington, D.C., in 2007.

After nearly forty years of operation, ESTA closed on June 30, 2018. They live on, however, in the work of those they inspired and trained, and many of their programs — including Pearls of Wisdom, History Alive, and Legacy Arts — will be continued by other well-established organizations in the field of creative aging.