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This session spoke to me deeply from my own experience deployed this year in my local public health department’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign. Whether it was being yelled at by angry people during the early days of limited supply and restricted eligibility, the unrelenting and thankless demands of countering disinformation and overcoming distrust, the highs of contributing to saving lives, the lows of confronting your own personal and institutional shortcomings, and the destructive self and interpersonal dynamics that can emerge under extreme stress…I got a small taste of the demands facing healthcare providers, demands that were heightened by the Covid crisis.

Colorado Resilience in Arts Lab (CORAL) is a groundbreaking applied research initiative that explores the use of art, music, dance and writing workshops to help healthcare professionals develop resilience and process the trauma and stress of their jobs. CORAL is a partnership between University of Colorado Hospital, the Ponzio Creative Arts Therapy Program at Children’s Hospital Colorado, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the NEA.

Dr. Marc Moss of University of Colorado Hospital described trends in the healthcare paradigm that have made healthcare professions increasingly difficult long before Covid. Among structural challenges such as administrative burdens, cost issues and less autonomy for providers, two other trends are especially striking to me—that patients are sicker with more chronic disease and critical illness, and that patients’ trust of the healthcare profession has declined to 34% in 2012 (from 73% in 1966). The crisis of burnout among healthcare professionals is system-threatening, evidenced by high hospital turnover rates and immediate challenges such as the national nursing shortage.

Katherine Reed of Ponzio Creative Arts Therapy Program and Mike Henry of Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop shared beautiful and evocative examples of how making art, music, dance movement, and therapeutic writing allows truths to emerge, be explored, processed and shared to build greater self and group resiliency.

I have left work countless times crying, bruised, bleeding, covered in bodily fluids.

Being the holder of someone else’s pain and trauma is never easy and always weighs on you…but we continue to show up day in and day out for our patients and for our coworkers.

From the two times in my life that I have been hospitalized, the memory of those few days at my most vulnerable with my life in the hands of doctors and nurses is indelible. I remember everything vividly and I often think about the people who cared for me, wondering what it’s like for them to show up day in and day out for countless patients like me when we are at our most vulnerable. The gift of arts therapy is that it allows healthcare professionals to express their vulnerability, and to find greater strength.

At our best, we soothe. We heal. We make things better.

Nono never imagined that name would cross seas and languages, and that the beloved granddaughters – mapenzi and mulowayi – would forever espouse this unconditional surrender to the familial.

But they did, and with an oasis in their knapsack they reimagined their childhood playground as their stage. In 2011, the duo from Barrio San Anton in Carolina, Puerto Rico decided to “feel the space, be present” in the known surroundings, says mulowayi Iyaye.

They fashioned a brand of homemade theater, the product of the tension between desire and their surroundings.
Mulowayi experienced “how complex it can be for people like me, who look like me, to become artists, to have access to this way of working and expressing ourselves.”

“When I looked at the art of Puerto Rico, I didn’t see myself reflected there, represented there, visible there.” And the sisters, through the use of their memories, began to “decolonize” the prevalent vision of theater.

This conception of space brings, according to the sisters, “an opportunity to be touched.” The house becomes a site of discovery. There’s food, shared power, and no physical distance between stage and the audience. In this context, they began delving in theater, then photography and multimedia. “We just have to find the spaces to imagine these decolonized futures… you find conflicts and challenges – but you take those and transform them.”

The transformation entails the possibility of discussing the island’s problems in what they term “moments of instant dramaturgy.” Poverty, race relations, the killing of black men in Puerto Rico appear as past of the space they create.

“The space and the ambience is the piece. The space has traveled,” they say, and it has appeared in Haiti, Germany, New York, among many places they have shown their art. “This house has traveled the world as theater.”

From the images of a crowd attending a show at a soon-to-be-closed Rio Piedras movie theater to the photographs of drowning Puerto Ricans, scholar Frances Negron-Muntaner probes the uncomfortable  definitions of the end of an era and of the start of another in troubled times.

“To say Puerto Rico is to say catastrophe,” says Negron-Muntaner, emphasizing that there always is a possibility to overturn such catastrophe, that action (artistic, political) is possible. In this reconsideration of the unending yet volatile relationship between place and art, artistic practices make up for a new infrastructure: outliving disaster by solving or finding a problem. Thus art becomes a research process, “a creative and transformative way of imagining,” even after 120 years of colonial rule.
But what do these artistic dreams owe to reality?

Reality, Negron Montaner posits, has been eternally composed of bodies in turmoil, yet always gesturing towards a future way of solving the catastrophe du jour. For example, the photographic series by Adal, “Puerto Ricans Under Water,” is presented as an archive of physical research, of “political and colonial neglect,” but also as the present that “allows citizens to exist.” Bodies, posing under water and sensing the forthcoming mystery that island life will allow them and the debts that they will have to feel responsible for and pay for. Almost buried in debt.

That has been the nominally inscribed PROMESA that the island has carried on its shoulders since 2015 – the colonial power’s mandated extraction of payment. A promise to “pay your debt.” A federally-mandated PROMESA, uncertain, in flux, but undoubtedly there- the neoliberal era that “makes the underneath visible” and attempts to make the unpayable payable.

Two things jumped out at me the most from this workshop. The first was the set of sharp and wise recommendations for guiding organizational change and sectoral change during uncertain times from the ArtsEd Response Collective, which was convened by Ingenuity to address the immediate challenges of COVID-19 and the police murders of Black people. And the second was the deeper dive into dance as an educational tool uniquely well-suited for engaging children and youth around issues of anti-racism and racial justice.

The ARC Final Report presents a plethora of resources for arts educators and organizations, schools, and equity practitioners in adapting and innovating new strategies and best practices that are responsive to the challenges of remote learning and pandemic conditions. The report lifts up what I think is one of the most important principles for any sector during these times of rapid change and volatility—to commit to open source knowledge sharing and learning, which is part of recognizing that we must engage in building anew and that “experimentation is now a part of the new operating norms for every industry…in order to do important work in an uncertain landscape.”

Another insight from this report is about fully exploring the arts as a tool for recovery from the crisis. Within the context of schools, this is especially poignant to consider the needs for reconnection and healing from learning loss, Covid-related traumas and economic hardships so many students have endured in communities hardest hit by the pandemic.

This session highlighted Forward Momentum Chicago’s dance education program, funded by Ingenuity with an explicit focus on anti-racism and racial justice, in partnership with Sutherland Elementary School in the Chicago public schools system. As program staff Bradlee Lathon and Jamerial Gloss described, designing and implementing the class pushed them to surmount the challenges of remote dance teaching and to confront (and address) gaps in the lack of age-appropriate teaching resources on anti-racism geared toward middle school and younger ages.

“We had to take a step back not to water down the content, but use language that youth understand and that turns the light on for them in a way that they maybe never experienced before,” Bradlee said. “Anti-racism and racial justice are still taboo topics for kids. People believe children aren’t ready to have these conversations. Maybe they don’t have the language and don’t know what to say, but they have feelings about it and they want to express it, and we have to give them the opportunity.”

Community-based art from my vantage point sounds a lot like community organizing.

The projects described by artists Chemi Rosado Seijo, Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón, and Edgardo Larregui make me think of the possibilities that emerge at the edges between creative disciplines, in service and collaboration with communities. These art projects were incubated by professional artists in dynamic partnership with residents, democratizing the arts among marginalized communities, uplifting and nourishing community life, and sparking the possibility for new solutions small and large.

In 2002, Chemi Rosado Seijo began collaborating with the community of El Cerro in Naranjito, Puerto Rico to paint their houses green, honoring and amplifying the topography of the mountainside where the houses are built. Alongside this activity, the community built relationship and connectivity as children and adults participated in painting, art workshops and creating a museum/community center.

Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón has worked throughout Latin America on community-based art projects that deliver very concrete solutions, such as paving an unpaved street in Chiapas, Mexico or rehabilitating a basketball court buried by a landslide in Bolivia. In 2003, he worked with homeless people in Puerto Rico, who earn income by watching cars, to come up with uniforms and signage (the Vela Parking Services) that gave them a visible identity and recognition for their work.

“I use the strategy of art as a reason to mobilize people,” he said.

Projects shared by Edgardo Larregui inspired me to consider, in working to build community engagement and power, how to begin through particular points of resourcefulness and strength within each community. An artist’s vision can help to see the potential of carports, for example, as a site for neighborhood residents to share what they want to with one another—whether that be playing music, bringing horses from the field for kids to ride, or youth creating their own dance workshops. Other projects, such as El Caldo de La Perla, tapped into the history of local fishermen, bringing their catch together to cook a giant fish stew to share in a communal event. Dr. Recao in 2003 was an invitation for farmers in the community to collect the seeds of the herb recao (culantro in English), a key ingredient in Puerto Rican food, and mail the seeds to diasporic family members to plant in New York City. The campaign included street murals and street signs lifting up the healing properties of the herb, its accessibility and cultural roots, in contrast to fast food chains.

“Community art is not a painting, sculpture or performance. You are working with human beings, who are in need,” said Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón. “We can effect change in the community and in ourselves. Through our work, we have created new spaces for artists and people who are not artists to participate in art.”

Such is the social impact of artist-led, community-based change.