Health and Wellness Through the Arts
The Wyoming Arts Council’s Health and Wellness Through the Arts program connects artists, arts organizations and health service providers to deliver creative opportunities to constituents managing a decline in health, living with a temporary or permanent physical, emotional or cognitive disability, or wishing to improve daily life. Participation in the arts has a direct effect on improving the health and wellbeing of every individual.
Benefits
The National Endowment for the Arts’ Staying Engaged Study reports that creative endeavors lead to higher cognitive skills, lower blood pressure, lower heart rates, and increased endorphins (needed for pain management). Additionally, the North Dakota Council on the Arts’ Art for Life Program Guide affirms that arts participation decreases the impact of loneliness, boredom, and helplessness.
Arts and Vaccine Confidence
The Wyoming Arts Council announces a new webpage featuring four Wyoming-based artists who created original work focused on their own lived-experiences through the COVID-19 pandemic, including illness, family member illness, loss of family members or community members, receiving the vaccine, and more, with the goal of encouraging COVID-19 and influenza vaccine confidence.
The featured artists are: Jared Rogerson, a country musician in Pinedale; Jasmine Pickner Bell and the North Bear Singers, a hoop dancer and traditional Arapaho drum group from Riverton; Rose Pecos-SunRhodes and Jared SunRhodes, a mother-and-son creative writing and ledger artist team from Fort Washakie; and Janissa Marie Analissia Martinez, a literary artist from Laramie. The webpage can be viewed here.
The Wyoming Arts Council (WAC) received a $75,000 grant from the CDC Foundation to create innovative work that harnesses the power of the arts to engage audiences and participants of all ages to build confidence in COVID-19 and influenza vaccines. Through this support from the CDC Foundation, the WAC announced a call for Wyoming-based artists and artist collectives for this project. A review committee selected the four artists, who each received $10,000 each to create their original work.
Funding for this effort is made possible through a sub-award from the CDC Foundation and is part of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) financial assistance award totaling $75,000 with 100 percent funding from CDC/HHS. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, CDC/HHS or the U.S. Government.
Creative Aging in Wyoming Communities
The Wyoming Arts Council has partnered with the Wyoming State Library and Lifetime Arts to develop a statewide creative aging program based in county libraries. Librarians and teaching artists from across Wyoming will undergo professional training from Lifetime Arts. Then, libraries will apply for grants through our partnership to hire the trained teaching artists to implement creative aging programs in their communities. This is part of our effort for a statewide shift to place intentional arts engagement at the center of elder programming.
Lifetime Arts is a national arts service organization that offers a positive, modern, artistic and social lens through which to serve, inspire and engage America’s growing population of older adults. To date, they have launched over 700 community-based programs, serving more than 10,000 older adults and have trained nearly 2,000 teaching artists and librarians, arts organization and senior service staff members to design, implement, and institutionalize these programs.
This training and grant money is funded in part through the Wyoming Community Foundation’s McMurry Library Endowment Fund, and the May & Stanley Smith Charitable Trust.
Survey of Wyoming’s Health and Wellness Through The Arts Interest and Activities
Resources
The National Endowment for the Arts’ Office of Accessibility is the advocacy-technical assistance arm of the Arts Endowment to make the arts accessible for people with disabilities, older adults, veterans, and people living in institutions.
Lifetime Arts’ mission is to encourage creative aging by promoting the inclusion of professional arts programs in organizations that serve older adults; to prepare artists to develop the creative capacity of older adult learners; and to foster lifelong learning in and through the arts by increasing opportunities for participation in community based programming.
The National Initiative for Arts & Health in the Military advances the arts in healthcare, healing, and well-being for military service members, veterans, their families and caregivers.
VSA, the international organization on arts and disability, was founded more than 35 years ago by Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith to provide arts and education opportunities for people with disabilities and increase access to the arts for all.
Contact: Josh Chrysler
