A new study offers compelling evidence that making, and not just viewing art, plays a role in stress reduction regardless of artistic talent or experience.
Americans for the Arts President and CEO Robert Lynch recently joined the Foundation for Art and Healing (FAH) to celebrate the launch of The UnLoneliness Project, a signature initiative developed by FAH and designed to address the often overlooked but mounting problem of loneliness within society. A growing body of research has demonstrated that loneliness, in addition to negatively contributing to mental health, carries the risk of early death at a rate comparable to smoking.
The arts continue to provide our returning servicemen and women an opportunity for expression, focus, and comradery through Shakespeare’s soldiers, who have become a model for the moral injury and conflicting emotions returning veterans experience.
Arts projects created in reaction to the hardships of the Flint water crisis serve to assuage grief, raise political awareness, educate, and allow residents to try to resume normal life as much as possible.
In a recent feature, the Philadelphia Inquirer examines the growing publishing genre of graphic medicine, which employs comics in the fields of medical education and patient care.
IDEAS xLab, based in Lousiville, KY, announced the receipt of a planning grant from the Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Inspired by meeting Curtis Bean, a veteran and founder of Art of War Project, and our ongoing work in the area of arts & healing through the National Initiative of Arts & Health in the Military, Bob Lynch published an article with the Huffington Post for Veterans Day 2015.
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. - Douglas MacArthur
Nothing could have been finer than the arts in Carolina during the National Veterans Creative Arts Festival (NVCAF) held in October at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Presented by the Veteran Administration, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and the American Legion Auxiliary, this year’s event was hosted by the Durham VA Medical Center. This year 3,345 Veterans from 130 VA medical facilities entered the art, music, drama, dance, and creative writing competitions at the local then state levels.
The Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts has current job openings for veterans, according to Ed Walsh, Veterans and Community Relations Manager. As an expression of thanks to those who have served our country, the Lincoln Center Veterans initiative offers attendance opportunities, discount tours, special events, and employment opportunities to active duty personnel and veterans of the US Armed Forces.
The Veterans Curation Program (VCP) is a paid training and employment opportunity that provides veterans with tangible work skills and experience through the rehabilitation of archaeological collections owned by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Veterans Curation Program is seeking OEF and OIF veterans, veterans with service-connected disabilities, and other recently separated veterans for a paid training program to work as archaeological laboratory technicians at facilities in Alexandria, VA, Augusta, GA, and St. Louis, MO for the upcoming session, scheduled to begin in early November 2015.
Words have the power to transform and, in the case of 16-year-old Aidan Kingwell of Oak Park, Illinois, they even have the power to save lives. Struggling with crippling depression, Kingwell read poet Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes” and came to realize that her life was worth living, even at a time when she doubted it the most.
Following the success of Americans for the Arts’ National Initiative for Arts & Health in the Military summit in February 2015, an invitation was extended to our President and CEO, Bob Lynch, to write a guest column for a spring issue of the NACo County News. NACo’s Veterans Affairs Committee features the guest column online: Arts Help Veterans Heal.
Health for Life, a new program created by the Office of Patient Centered Care and Cultural Transformation (OPCC&CT) at the VA, is changing the way they talk about healthcare to include the arts in healing as a valued asset to whole health care and well-being for our Veterans.
