Tribute for Sandra (Kagin) Graves-Alcorn, PhD, ATR-BC, LPAT

Sandra (Kagin) Graves-Alcorn, past president of the American Art Therapy Association and co-creator of the Expressive Therapies Continuum, died on September 16, 2021, at the age of 78.  She was born into a military family.  As the daughter of a college professor, she was raised to be inquisitive and went on to become a pioneer in a new profession called “art therapy”.  Sandra’s career spanned more than five decades, and she was working as a forensic art therapist at the time of her death.

From humble beginnings as an undergraduate apprentice at the Children’s Memorial Center in Tulsa, Sandra eagerly latched onto any opportunities available for learning about the use of art in psychology and healing.  She worked as a social worker and then as the director of art and occupational therapy at state facilities in Oklahoma and Kansas that served individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities, as well as traumatic brain injury and other debilitating conditions. 

As Sandra pursued her master’s degree in special education and child psychology at the University of Tulsa, she had the good fortune of being able to conduct funded research on art and the adaptive functioning of the individuals with whom she worked.  Sandra found that the three variables that make the biggest difference in a client’s output are the degree of project difficulty, the degree of project flexibility, and the degree of friction present in the art materials used.  She named these variables “task complexity”, “task structure”, and “media properties'', respectively, and collectively called them Media Dimension Variables, or MDV.  Today’s art therapists know “media properties” as the range of fluid to resistive art materials.

When Sandra moved to Kentucky in 1969 to assume directorship of the newly revived graduate art therapy program at the University of Louisville, she also became a founding member and the first Standards Chair of the American Art Therapy Association (AATA).  In the early days of the AATA common ground had to be found in order for the new profession of art therapy to identify itself and figure out what an art therapist should be and do.  Sandra was instrumental in helping to find this common ground; she organized the very first meeting of people who were training art therapists, a precursor of the current Coalition of Art Therapy Educators (CATE). In education, in theory, and in practice she was contributory and influential. 

While at the University of Louisville she earned an interdisciplinary PhD in psychiatry, pediatrics, and special education and founded the Institute for Expressive Therapies.  Sandra hired colleague Vija Lusebrink to assist her in teaching and researching the relationship between the different expressive therapies.  Their collaboration resulted in the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC), a pantheoretical framework that is now well-known in the art therapy world.  The ETC is a model that posits how therapeutic shifts in Media Dimension Variables can influence creative mental activity and change an individual’s ability to process and integrate information at physical, emotional, and intellectual levels.  The framework was ahead of its time when Sandra and Vija introduced it through a presentation and publication in 1978, but currently the ETC is regarded as a viable framework for art therapy assessment and treatment and is taught in art therapy graduate programs around the world.

Sandra had a knack for expanding and evolving, and so she opened four businesses that served people experiencing grief and loss.  Her use of mental image restructuring was helpful to countless people who were troubled by the pictures that were trapped in their heads.  From this work came Expressions of Healing: Embracing the Process of Grief, a book she published in 1994.  She also published Implementing the Expressive Therapies Continuum: A Guide for Clinical Practice in 2017 with her daughter-in-law and fellow art therapist, Christa Kagin.

Drawn to the notion of unifying the expressive therapies, Sandra served on the executive board of Expressive Media, Inc.  Her tenure there began in 2011, roughly a dozen years after her retirement from the University of Louisville, and continued until her death.  Some of Sandra’s other endeavors over the course of her career include serving as a co-therapist for Survivors of Suicide; founding SAME (Surviving a Murder Effectively); assisting with the development of RESPOND, a crisis team of mental health agencies in Louisville; serving as Coordinator of Training for Critical Incident Stress Debriefing teams in seven counties in Kentucky and southern Indiana; and serving as co-chair of the Intervention Committee, Task Force on Childhood Sex Abuse appointed by the Kentucky Commonwealth Attorney. She was an advocate in every sense of the word and served as a court liaison and an evaluator in child custody cases. She testified in court as an expert witness and also before the Commonwealth of Kentucky on behalf of victims, as well as for art therapy as a profession.  

Sandra also became involved in the local arts community.  An art therapist at heart, she knew creating and sharing art was transformative and found ways to foster this at all levels.  Although she left this world unexpectedly following a brief illness, she made her mark on those she touched and introduced art therapy to a wide public audience.  She even made an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show.  The University of Louisville awarded Sandra with the distinction of Outstanding Alumnae upon her retirement in 1998 after 29 years of service.  She was indeed outstanding, and her contributions to the art therapy profession and the expressive therapies are immeasurable.