Green and Grey Couple Painting

Lyshak’s seminal inspirations were during childhood, viewing art exhibitions at the Detroit Institute of Arts and viewing modern art paintings in her art history class at University of Michigan. Inspired to become a painter, she traveled to Paris to study painting for a summer. Returning to the United States, she plunged into painting and got her BFA from the Center for Creative Studies and Wayne State University in Detroit. Together these seminal events and studies propelled her into a 50-year commitment to painting, from which she has never veered. After college, Lyshak moved to New York City’s East Village in the 1970s. There she joined a creative community that included now renowned writers, musicians and artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Gary Indiana, John Lurie and Larry Mitchell. This was a wildly rebellious community that encouraged her in her off-beat style of painting that was antithetical to the prevailing trends of minimalism, Pop, and conceptual art. She used the canvas like a theater stage, filling it with scenes of people, animals, dolls, and toys. With figures and landscapes, she investigated the underbelly of life from a feminist perspective. Later she documented this community in a series of interviews and images: The Bar Project: Interviews with East Village Artists about the 1980’s. Over time she furthered her education to earn an MPS in Creative Arts Therapy from Pratt Institute, New York. After getting her master’s degree, she worked part-time as an art therapist, with a focus on the psychiatric care of clients with trauma. She designed and led community art service programs in New York City and in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. For many years, she launched and captained an art therapy program at Bronx Children’s Psychiatric Hospital. This professional immersion in art as a therapeutic tool influenced the focus of her visual practice on psychological experience. Her early figurative work culminated in 1993 where she staged an exhibition that explored her own recovery from childhood sexual abuse. The paintings were reproduced in a book with accompanying text published by Safer Society Press, Brandon, VT, 1999 and can be seen online at The Secret: Art and Healing from Sexual Abuse. With the exhibition and publication of her book, she was finally able to let go of the narratives of her own past.