How This Big Arts Show Across 18 U.S. Locations Can Help Health

You may have heard people tell you that there’s an art to healthy living. Well, the Arts For EveryBody campaign has been aiming to show everybody how the arts can help lead to healthier people and communities. And on July 27, 2024, this campaign is going to put on quite a show. Or rather a bunch of shows coordinated together. That day, hundreds of artists, community leaders, and health professionals in 18 different cities and towns across the U.S. will come together to show for the first time a variety of large-scale participatory art projects and how they can improve the mental and physical well-being of everyone around them.

One of the goals of this big undertaking is to paint a different picture of the arts—one that’s different from wat may be a prevailing stereotype. You may think of the arts as something that’s more for fun and entertainment. You may have seen in high school and college how people were separated into the artsy crowds, the sciency crowds, the pre-meddy crowds, and whatever other cliques were featured in movies like Mean Girls. Such high schoolish distinctions have extended way into adulthood with different fields, disciplines and sectors remaining quite separated and siloed.

In actuality, though, these separations are quite arbitrary. There’s no real reason why the arts, health, and science shouldn’t be much more highly integrated. In fact, a number of scientific studies have shown how the arts can lead to better mental and physical health outcomes as alluded to by the National Endowments for the Arts website. For example, engaging in different types of creative arts may help increase your serotonin levels and the blood flow to those pleasure parts of your brain, both of which can help you feel better and more effectively prevent and combat disease. It can also help expand creativity, foster optimism and enhance social interactions, all of which are associated with better health.

These possibilities didn’t escape Lear deBessonet, a Tony-nominated theater director, who, in her words, “became convinced about the mental and physical benefits of the arts and the benefits to the overall community during her over 20 years of practice,” which has included directing different theater shows on and off Broadway. This motivated her to found and serve as the Co-Artistic Director for the One Nation One Project that organized the Arts for EveryBody campaign.

“It felt like such an urgent time when we gave birth to the idea for the campaign in 2020,” deBessonet recalled. If you recall, the year 2020 was a little bit different from other years. That’s when a thing called the Covid-19 pandemic got started, and the U.S. was—umm, how shall we describe it—kind of caught with its proverbial pants down. “There was that health crisis and multiple other crises,” she went on to say. “They revealed that one sector alone was not able to meet the complexity of society and that there was a need for joining hands across sectors.”

Working across sectors can be easier said than done these days with many people entrenched deeply in their siloes. “Cross sector work means blazing trails that aren't there yet,” deBessonet explained. “We had to help build new relationships. This included learning one another's language and a lot of listening.”

Then there was the problem of finding money—which never gets in the way of anything, right? After all, the phrase “doing it for the money” and “going into the arts” don’t necessarily go together. “We faced the challenge of how to fund this work,” she said. “The work of community based artists has been undervalued and stripped of financial resources. Many funding sources had separate arts and health departments, but we eventually found foundations that were innovative.” On March 27, One Nation One Project and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York held a roundtable discussion about innovative ways to integrate arts-based interventions into different types of health programming and this can be financed. One Nation One Project has gotten support from Tides Center as well as Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Create Foundation, Doris Duke Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, The Tow Foundation and various other family foundations.

Clyde Valentin, who has served as the Executive Director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts and became the co-founder and Co-Artistic Director for the One Nation One Project, recalled how, “Lear called me in 2021 with this idea that had tremendous resonance. It was an opportunity to engage people in a time-based project that had an endpoint. It’s easier to say yes to something that had an endpoint versus open-ended.”

That endpoint will be July 27 when locations in Chicago, Gainesville, Honolulu, New York City, Providence, Seattle and 12 other American towns and cities will be featuring actors, muralists, poets, folk dancers, circus clowns, farmers, flower artists, skaters, cooks, architects, DJs, puppeteers, nurses, mariachi players, bamboo weavers and many other artists and their work. This will all be under the banner of a very Oz theme for the event: “No Place Like Home.”

Garrett, who was the sixth Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the first woman of color to lead a $44 million theater and Co-Artistic Director of the One Nation One Project, described how this has been a collaboration of, “Community-based arts orgs and community health organizations to help communities grow, establish new collaborations and new ways to work together.”

The idea of people working together across sectors, communities and other groups is counter to a lot of the divisive and often racist, sexist and other “ist” political rhetoric that has been occurring these days. Now, let’s see, was there ever a time when a political leader used rhetoric to divide people so that the leader could then take over everything? Hmm. How about the 1930s when Fascism was taking over a good part of Europe?

Well, back in 1936 in response to what was happening in Europe, the Federal Theater Project organized stage productions of the play “It Can’t Happen Here” in 18 cities and towns across the U.S. as a dire warning. This play was an adaptation of a dystopian political novel written by Sinclair Lewis. The plot of this play and novel was that, yes, it, meaning Fascism and totalitarianism, can indeed happen here and anywhere. Does the number 18 sound familiar? Well, that’s because this 1936 Federal Theater Project of yesteryear helped inspire the Arts For EveryBody campaign of this year that will take place in the same number of cities and towns.

Like the 1930s, the 2020s seem to be a pivotal period in history in many ways. The Covid-19 pandemic uncovered many of the deep problems that have long existed in the U.S. and remained covered up for decades. In order to proceed to a healthier future, America will need to paint a different picture, sing a different song, move into a different act and sculpt a better vision. And the arts can really help do all of this. The question is will artists have the resources and opportunity to show all that they can do?