In conversation with presenters and attendees at Healing Arts Houston, I came to recognize at last some of the conditions I’d been learning about over the past year while doing some work for Houston’s BIPOC Arts Network & Fund. The initiative’s first major project was to invest $2M to BIPOC organizations and collectives in the Houston area to support their work in arts and culture.
These organizations are regularly overlooked by major arts funders, facing barriers to access to spaces where public and private philanthropies operate. Many have been active for years within their communities, doing work recognized and valued in their communities, drawing largely on accessible resources like volunteer labor, borrowed spaces, and materials supplied out of pocket.
What has struck me about the 120 organizations who received much-needed funding through BANF was how many of them – about 17 percent, to my count – are explicitly devoted to arts in health, addressing community health, mental health, even medical care through the arts. Arts in health appears to be a significant component of the BIPOC arts ecosystem in the Houston area.
At Healing Arts Houston, a panel from the UH Arts Leadership Degree Program at the College of Arts offered a presentation on the parameters of the new Arts and Health Certification program, significantly its focus on learning through practice. Students are able to collaborate with organizations that have arts in health programs in community and healthcare settings throughout the Houston area. The certification program represents an important step in the professionalization of the field, one of the principle aims of the National Organization for Arts in Health.
A national leader in arts in health who was attending this presentation asked about the development of these collaborations and about the certification program’s overall engagement with Houston’s arts sector. Were arts organizations receptive to arts in health as a discipline and a practice? Could the arts-in-health “movement” be ascertained in Houston? The conversation here, without intention, began by naming some of the most prestigious orchestras, museums, and theaters in our city.
In conversation, it was recognized this these organizations generally do sponsor or support various outreach programs: arts in health projects might be adopted alongside a given organization’s existing DEI or young audience initiatives.
My head was spinning. The focus on these organizations reflected habits of thought and expressions of value that reinforced their position at the center of Houston’s arts scene, where public and private funding converge. Their DEI initiatives, however worthy and successful they may be, stand at the side of their mission to produce and present prestige art, often to wealthy patrons. As BIPOC arts leaders keep discovering, DEI and young audience programs mounted by prestige arts organizations can soak up available funding and then duplicate –or risk erasing – long-standing and thriving BIPOC arts programs. Furthermore, the practice of arts in health serves not as a sideline practice within Houston’s BIPOC arts communities, but stands at the core the mission and purpose of a good many organizations founded by, led by, and serving people of color. When we profess that our health and wellbeing, and the strength of our communities, depend on our access to and engagement with the arts, that wisdom is not new or in need of discovery.
It seems to me that BIPOC communities are leading the way in the field of art in health, and so arts in health professionals, and those training into the profession, would benefit by looking to them as leaders, as expert practitioners, as sites for valuable collaboration and professional training.
Healing Arts Houston was a large and multifaceted conference that included many more conversations and participants than just this one. In fact, two BANF grantees offered presentations there about their work. Aisha Siddiqui, director of Culture of Health – Advancing Together (CHAT) presented a featured talk, “The Science behind Art Engagement for Immigrant and Refugee Health.” Artists Brian Ellison, Marlon Hall, and Anthony Suber discussed their work in “The Black Man Project and UnMASKulinity: Community Therapy through the Arts.” In addition, the chamber orchestra Kinetic Ensemble presented a short performance with Houston Contemporary Dance.
To bring this conversation back to the excellent work done by the National Organization for Arts in Health, two item are worth mentioning.
One regards the effort to professionalize the field, creating credentials, establishing standards, a code of ethics, and therefore some accountability for its practitioners. Sociologist Magali Sarfatti Larson characterizes professionalism as “the process by which producers of special services [seek] to constitute and control a market for their expertise.” NOAH has been open about the tensions in its professionalism initiatives, intending not to repeat patterns of exclusion that were a feature of the professionalization of fields like medicine, which deliberately sidelined midwives specifically, women generally, and community-based care providers, resulting in terrible outcomes for women and communities of color. Professionalizing the field of art in health may require – again and always – addressing and challenging systems that divide the academy from other ways of knowing, that seek and recognize and learn from expertise and wisdom not readily found in the curriculum of any degree program. Learning from experts and leaders outside of the academy will shape research practice, and the fundamental understanding of data, measurement, analysis, and knowledge.
The other point acknowledges NOAH’s March 2021 statement, an update of an earlier letter published during the summer of 2020, a season when nonprofits and corporations across the United States were declaring their commitment to antiracism in reaction to the murder of George Floyd and the heavy burden of COVID-19 in communities of color. These declarations often took accountability for how even well-meaning nonprofit organizations devoted to public service operate within longstanding and unspoken or ignored systems of oppression and violence.
NOAH’s professionalism initiatives are not addressed as such in this statement, but this pledge is declared: to “make antiracism in arts in health a primary topic in all inter-organizational partnerships and collaborations.” If, in fact, these racialized artists and arts organizations – these potential partners and collaborators –are focused already on the intersection of arts and health, then they need to be recognized, honored, and thoughtfully invited to lead the way in the field and the profession of arts in health.