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What Can Arts and Culture Do for Public Health?

Stephanie Eche

Drawing by Stephanie Echeveste

I’ve always been interested in the arts and culture, but it wasn’t until I worked as the Placemaking Manager for Vornado and JBG Smith that I realized how important it is for everyone to be creative and have access to art. During my time as Placemaking Manager, my sister was in a Masters of Public Health program at Georgetown University and we had many discussions about how art and culture create positive impacts for public health.

A few years ago I was a part of the Urban Land Institute Health Leaders Network and further confirmed my hunch that increasing access to arts and culture will improve health benefits for anyone and everyone in a community. I’ve also had many doctors appointments over the last few years for various health issues and I am very thankful that NYU Langone, my health care provider, has artwork in all their facilities. They are even collaborating with the World Health Organization and the Museum of Modern Art for further research on art and public health.


How does art and culture improve health?

There are a variety of ways that art and culture can create positive health impacts. Anyone who has ever been to a museum, made something with their hands, discovered a new mural, or attended a street fair in public space has probably experienced this first hand. When you have access to arts and culture you feel inspired, socially connected, and/or create a pleasant memory that you may think about later on. I would argue that creating with others or experiencing an art moment in community makes health benefits even better.

We know that art and culture can create positive health benefits for individuals, for example listening to music can decrease heart rate, viewing visual art can reduce stress and anxiety, and participating in creative movement like theater or visual art creation can improve physical range of motion and cognitive skills (cited from The Connection Between Art, Healing, and Public Health: A Review of Current Literature by Heather L. Stuckey, DEd and Jeremy Nobel, MD, MPH).

Using art to improve public health

The University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine and ArtPlace America’s Creating Healthy Communities through Cross-sector Collaboration teamed up to figure out if and how art and culture benefits public health as part of their Creating Healthy Communities: Arts + Public Health in America initiative. Their white paper draws on the experiences of more than 250 thought leaders in public health, arts and culture, and community development from 2018 and 2019 (note, this is pre-COVID-19 pandemic) as well as a national field survey of 500 participants and focus groups plus public health literature.

Here are the ways they found that art can culture can improve public health:

1) Provide Direct Health Benefits

Based on what we know about the individual benefits of art and culture on health outcomes, we know that participating in art and culture has a positive impact on public health overall.

2) Make Memorable Moments

Being able to have a shared positive experience via art and culture helps individuals collectively create shared meanings that help improve their individual and communal experiences.

3) Better Communication and Education Efforts

By using arts and culture in communication and education you can make public health more enticing and also more accessible to more people. Examples and case studies from the white paper include The Village of Arts and Humanities, North Central Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and East Los High by WISE Entertainment, Watch on Hulu.

4) Increased Participation in Health Services

If you pair a mobile dentist with an outdoor concert, you’re going to get more people interested in getting their teeth checked out. We’ve seen this with the COVID-19 vaccine distribution. Pairing an art or culture experience with a health service will make it more exciting for the public and make them more likely to participate.

5) Create Dialogue

Participating in art and culture experiences — whether watching or making — make it easier to talk about the hard stuff or share health issues. I’ve experienced this first hand in leading creative activations and workshops. People always open up once they start creating and we have really thoughtful conversations.

6) Connect Health Services with Arts and Culture Spaces

This is similar to increasing participating, but when health services are physically near, or I would argue even virtually near, an arts or culture space you’re more likely to get the public to learn about and access the health service. If you’re interested in ideas of how to connect health and arts and culture services, I’d love to help figure it out as a creative consultant.

7) Increase Community-led, -generated, and -sustained Health Practices

Creating art and culture as a community creates more social cohesion, a sense of place, and increases a feeling of belonging. By working within existing arts and culture community projects you can help socialize health promotion and create more channels of communication about public health in the community. Tapping into existing arts and culture networks also helps to strengthen the community to have long-lasting health benefits instead of just one campaign that eventually ends.

8) Organize and Mobilize

Using arts and culture helps reach many more people than just relying on traditional public health communication strategies. We’ve seen this with the COVID-19 vaccine — people are more likely to trust a friend or family member than what they see or read in the news or from the government. By utilizing art and culture strategies we can create even better word-of-mouth and online dissemination.

I really enjoyed the Creating Healthy Communities through Cross-sector Collaboration white paper because they include strong research findings on how public health can be improved with art and culture initiatives and creative placemaking. They also include great examples/case studies of projects that are using art and culture to improve public health. They acknowledge that public health as a field needs innovation and should include both top-down and bottom-up interventions. The piece gives some great, short summaries of different sectors and how they can work together to advance public health, especially in public space. 

What this white paper is missing:

  • While they talk about ‘providing a framework,’ they focus a lot on the why and the what, not so much on the how. It would have been helpful to dive deeper into the examples and case studies they shared and detail exactly how the projects came to be. Some helpful things to include: timeline (from idea to conception to end, if it’s not still ongoing), funding sources, budget (and how that may have changed overtime), key obstacles to the project and how they overcame them, and how the program records progress.  This is what I do! If you are interested in figuring out and implementing arts and culture to improve public health outcomes, consider hiring me as a creative consultant.

  • Links! This white paper has excellent examples of art and culture projects, organized by issue they deal with, but there is no mention of budgets or other resources needed to implement the projects. It would be helpful to have a realistic idea of how much these projects cost and what it took to get them off the ground. Many of these projects have some of that information available on their websites, but there are no links from the white paper. I added links above for quick access. It actually looks like there were supposed to be hyperlinks in the pdf, but they aren’t there for me. There is a great repository of resources for projects, reports, even people in the Creating Healthy Communities network. 

  • One main flaw is that is leaves out real estate developers. Where is the call to action for the companies developing and building both on public and private land? How might the real estate development industry be brought in to this cross-sector collaborative party? There are other initiatives working on this, namely Urban Land Institute’s Healthy Leaders Network, something I was a part of in 2017-2018. While I completely understand the intended audience is the public health sector and that there needs to be a mindset change just within the public health sector to accept and incorporate art and culture as part of the solution to many chronic problems, I don’t really see the possibility of much advancement without real estate development—as an industry and as individual projects — on board. 

    How else can arts and culture help public health?

    The white paper also identifies five urgent health issues that can and should be collaboratively approached to improve with examples of projects that do so:

    • Collective trauma

    • Racism

      • "Artistic activism and arts-based organizing efforts can engage communities of color and allies in observing, analyzing, and responding creatively to racism (The Center for Artistic Activism; Duncombe et al., 2017).” (pg. 22)

      • Examples/Case Studies:

    • Social Exclusion and Isolation

      • "In response to these serious impacts, public health has developed a range of health interventions and coalitions designed to address upstream causes of social exclusion (Aldridge et al., 2018). In these efforts, place-based arts and cultural strategies can play crucial roles by supporting the “drivers” of social cohesion—the ways in which people become closer to one another, more connected to the place in which they live, more likely to engage in civic life, and more likely to hold aspirations for improving the common good.” (pg. 26)

      • Examples/Case Studies:

    • Mental Health

      • "Mental health is associated with place via an increasing recognition of protective factors such as social capital, social support, collective efficacy, and social networks—all of which are linked to lower levels of depression and anxiety in adolescents and adults (Curtis et al., 2010; Donnelly et al., 2016; McKenzie, Whitley, & Weich, 2002).” (pg. 30)

      • "While there are no quick or simple solutions for eliminating mental illnesses such as depression or substance abuse, those working at the intersections of community, arts and culture, health, and social change offer models of innovative work.” (pg. 30)

      • Examples/Case Studies:

    • Chronic Disease

      • “…biomedical approaches alone will not address the epidemic of chronic diseases. In addition, they cannot provide the “complete physical, mental and social well-being” described by the World Health Organization (WHO) in its definition of health (1946), nor do they consistently offer strategies for prevention. Thus, in addition to epidemiology, surveillance, and health care system interventions, the CDC calls for environmental approaches, including linking community programs to clinical services for preventing or reducing chronic disease. In fact, the National Conference of State Legislators (n.d.) recommends “promoting health and wellness programs in schools, worksites, and communities, enabling healthy choices and environments, ensuring access to a full range of quality health services for people with chronic conditions, eliminating racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic health disparities, and efforts to educate the public about their health and how to prevent chronic disease.” These recommendations indicate that offering arts and cultural activities at (and as part of) community health clinics and other anchor institutions could help advance holistic, environmental approaches to chronic disease.” (pg. 34)

      • Examples/Case Studies:

  • Other Recommendations from the white paper:

    • Recommendations for public health sector (pg. 42)

      • Know your local arts and culture spaces, people, and programs

      • Locate health and social services with arts/culture services

      • Partner and incorporate local artists and arts organizations in your program design and development

      • Look for what already has been created and investigate what it means. Value existing creative solutions to problems that may be overlooked.  — “Look to local arts and cultural artifacts for answers"

      • “Support local grassroots efforts"

      • Advocate for inclusion in the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion’s Healthy People 2030, which currently makes no mention of arts and culture. 

    • Recommendations for other sectors (pg. 43)

      • Collaborate with other sectors for strategy sessions 

      • Host events with your collaborators in your space or swap spaces

      • Co-host conventions or meetings

      • Develop shared outcomes with collaborators

What do you think arts and culture can do for public health? Considering commissioning artwork for your health facility or in need of a creative project? Check out our arts and culture consulting services.