A Day at the Intersection of Arts and Health
CAC Outreach & Events Coordinator recounts her experience at the Los Angeles County Arts & Health Week Summit
On Friday, June 14, I attended the third annual Los Angeles County Arts & Health Week Summit at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Downtown Los Angeles. The free event — with a registration list of 500 people, requiring a waitlist — was hosted by L.A. Opera in collaboration with L.A. County Supervisor Hilda L. Solis, First District; L.A. County Department of Arts and Culture, a State-Local Partner of the CAC; and Jameel Arts & Health Lab.
My day began by collecting my nametag, tote bag, and the summit schedule and visiting the community resource fair, which featured several county, city, and local nonprofit organizations focused on the theme of the day, arts and health. I was excited to connect with Kristy from California Arts Council grantee Able ARTS Work during the fair, learning more about their upcoming after-school mural project, and field trips for 3rd through 12th-grade students to professional arts spaces, funded in part by grants from our Creative Youth Development and Arts Education Exposure programs.
As the summit presentations began, an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter settled in at audience level, stage left, as the welcome, land acknowledgment, and opening remarks were made by various event hosts and partner organizations, including Christopher Koelsch, president and CEO of L.A. Opera; Andréa Fuentes, vice president of L.A. Opera Connects; County Supervisor Solis; Renée Fleming, World Health Organization Goodwill ambassador for arts and health; Julie Gerberding, CEO of Foundation for the National Institutes of Health; and Rachel Moore, president and CEO of the Music Center.
Many of the comments highlighted the importance of partnerships to address a list of ongoing local community challenges affecting neighborhoods throughout the county. Generous thanks were echoed from each speaker for the unyielding support they have received from County Supervisor Solis, who Fuentes introduced as “a passionate advocate for artful lives, health, and well-being.”
County Supervisor Solis, the first Latina to serve in a presidential cabinet, graced the stage in a hot-pink blazer to highlight programs for arts and culture implemented in L.A. County, including town halls that resulted in the Creative Strategist program, which places artists and creatives in L.A. County departments to work alongside staff in a “collaborative process to develop, strategize, promote, and implement artist-driven solutions to complex social challenges.”
The day’s first panel, “Advancing Arts and Health: L.A. County in Conversation,” led by Kristin Sakoda, director of the L.A. County Department of Arts and Culture, began by rooting us in the mission of her department’s work. “The arts are vital to civic life and should be accessible for all of our community and all of our people,” she said.
She shared that many civic art projects are currently being completed at the various county health, hospital, and well-being centers, noting a past research study that found many hospital patients who stayed for multiple days recovered quicker if they could see art or nature from their hospital room.
Following her highlights, Sakoda was joined on stage by Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the L.A. County Department of Public Health, for a conversation on the state of health equity in the county. Dr. Ferrer expressed that her role and the work of her department cannot be done alone, giving praise to many L.A. arts organizations and CAC grantee Urban Voices, which was started by a local health clinic seeking to form a choir for the residents of Skid Row in Downtown L.A.
She believes the organization is a successful example of using arts as a “social determinant of health [SDOH].” The term SDOH, which was brought up throughout the day references “the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes,” according to the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some examples include education access and quality, health care access and quality, economic stability, neighborhood and built environment, and social and community context.
She also revealed how important cross-sector relationships were for her staff during the height of COVID when the number of deaths broached 350 in a day at one point. Local arts organizations came together to offer free tickets to their musical and theater performances to extend support for the work of roughly 5,500 county Public Health employees, boosting morale for her team during unprecedented times.
The following panel, “Harmonizing Wellness: Exploring Arts and Health Research,” featured a discussion on recent projects, trends, and advancements at the intersection of arts and health with leading academic researchers. The panel moderator, Dr. Levitin, neuroscientist and musician, stated, “One positive thing to come out of the pandemic was witnessing how important the arts were to people.” He highlighted the fact that many “sought refuge in the arts” during the pandemic.
After hearing this, I immediately flashed back to watching “Learn How to Knit” videos on YouTube and making several cowls and beanies riddled with errors for my friends and family throughout 2020. He continued by saying, “If the arts were [at the] forefront now, we don’t need to think of them as a refuge in bad times. We can think of them as a way to promote resilience and wellness in the very beginning and create a better society.”
Dr. Nisha Sajnani, co-director at the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, spoke about arts and health work on the international level, highlighting the Lab and World Health Organization’s first co-sponsored, countrywide arts and health festival, Healing Arts Scotland. The festival is also hosted by the Scottish Ballet, which she identified as the “champion on the ground,” establishing each of the policy priorities on the country level for the event. The festival is scheduled for this August in partnership with the Edinburgh International Festival.
Following the lunch break, attendees were treated to opera selections from Soprano Alaysha Fox and pianist Nicholas Roehler. The two musicians are alumni of the L.A. Opera Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program, a multiyear paid residency for singers and pianists transitioning from academic settings to a professional opera career. Fox effortlessly sang “L’Invitation au voyage” by French composer Henri Duparc, and “Frühling” from German composer Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, while Roehler flawlessly flowed through the arrangements, making me an immediate fan of the duo and a future opera attendee.
In the afternoon, attendees enjoyed three “hands-on” activations for a small break from the program discussions. Stacie Aamon Yeldell, a music psychotherapist and award-winning vocalist, guided us through a calming meditation while singing and playing her guitar, encouraging attendees to join her.
Besides my frequent shower ballads, I do not consider myself a vocalist of any kind, so to find myself in a bright room with more than one hundred people — eyes closed, mind calm, and singing along– I was hypnotized by the sound of her voice and the music. I completely lost track of the time, but realized I would not mind sitting in the hall the rest of the afternoon with Stacie playing her guitar in the background.
Next, Eric Whitacre, a Grammy Award-winning composer, recounted his journey of learning to read music as a young college student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to becoming the composer, conductor, and creator of the Virtual Choir. The choir is performed independently with each participant recording videos of themselves singing a piece of music composed by Whitacre, who works with an editor to compile each submission into one harmonious piece shared online.
Every choir member’s submission, regardless of the quality of the singer’s voice, is included. Although the project began well before the commonly recognized themes of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA), Whitacre was implementing this ideology from the beginning. He kindly conducted an impromptu choir with summit attendees in our seats, showcasing how harmonious we sounded together without practice or familiarity with one another.
As a millennial who spends too many waking hours on social media, I was surprised to learn about the choir, which went viral for the first time in 2010, featuring 185 singers from 12 different countries. As the pandemic began, Eric and his team were more than prepared to create another edition of the choir: This project was social distancing before we were forced to practice it. Virtual Choir 6 was released on July 19, 2020, featuring 17,572 singers from 129 countries.
The final “experience” was a live research demonstration with Dr. Robert M. Bilder, director of the NEA Research Lab at UCLA. He asked us to use our smartphones and scan the quick response (QR) code included in his slide presentation to respond to questions anonymously about our experiences of “awe” during the summit. Within seconds, our live data was available to view and use on the monitors. The energy of the audience noticeably increased once the demonstration began, and I was honored to play a small part in the bigger research plan.
Throughout Dr. Builder’s demonstration, he would point to the lab’s undergraduate and graduate student researchers who were in the audience. As a proud Bruin myself, I found it moving to witness these students receive recognition in public from their advisors and mentors after dedicating themselves to a field. Their acknowledgment also highlights the importance of collaboration and partnership in accomplishing this work, as these young people are the future of arts and health research.
The featured keynote by Dr. Jill Sonke, director of Research Initiatives at the University of Florida Center for the Arts in Medicine, highlighted the evidence based on her work that prescribing arts in clinical and community settings has positive impacts. I found myself consumed by her retelling of prescribing ballet to relieve some of the pain experienced by a young patient with sickle cell, a group of inherited red blood cell disorders that affect hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen through the body. As someone who watched a family member deal with the pain of sickle cell disease, I often struggled when their pleas for relief went unheard. Dr. Sonke’s presentation was a great motivator to advocate for prescribing arts in clinical spaces, especially when other medical options are not providing answers.
The final session of the day, “Action the Future: Arts for Society,” was moderated by Grammy Award-winner Renée Fleming and panelists who are featured in her new book, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. During the panel, Dr. Levitin shared scientific findings from a mapping project determining where different types of music are processed in the brain, highlighting that music offers a similar dopamine reward response to a gambler winning a bet. Another panelist Dr. Indre Viskontas acknowledged the exquisite work of the two ASL interpreters and compared it to how music transforms our brains, noting how children who use sign language and music view the world differently.
At the end of the day, I made sure to check in with some familiar faces to the CAC, Julie Baker, CEO of California for the Arts; and LADAC Director Kristin Sakoda. The summit requested no photos of the panels and performances — I innocently took a couple — so they were kind enough to allow me to capture a lovely photo of them to remember the day.
As I rushed off in my Uber to catch my flight back to Sacramento, I reflected on a few themes that stuck with me from the summit:
· Every citizen in our cities, counties, states, and country has a right to quality arts and health access. Cost is often a determinant of how arts can be implemented in our lives, but Scott from Music Mends Minds, an arts organization focused on people experiencing memory loss, played the “drums” using a box that he turned over in front of me to challenge my thinking.
· Cross-sector partnerships and collaboration are critical to start conversations, develop new ways of thinking, to successfully make change. We must be in this together.
· The intersection of arts and health as a field of study and practice might appear new to some, but artists and medical professionals have seen the connection and benefits for years. With an opportunity to allocate more funding to this unique work, the options are endless on how this work can support the health of our society.
Following years of distance due to the pandemic, I am incredibly grateful to work at the California Arts Council, where visiting artists and arts workers, arts and culture bearers, arts administrators and researchers, and arts communities across California is a part of my everyday role. I look forward to the next opportunity to speak with and learn from our resilient, vibrant arts community.
For more information about 2024 L.A. County Arts and Health Week Summit sessions and the full schedule, visit: https://www.laopera.org/community/opera-for-all/opera-for-life-and-wellness/arts-and-health-week/
Qiana Moore is the Outreach and Events Coordinator for the California Arts Council. She can be reached at qiana.moore@arts.ca.gov.
