1) To comprehensively review outcomes measures and community engagement in the extant literature on arts-based public health interventions.
2) To better understand the interrelationship of race, urban planning, and neighborhood -level health outcomes.
3) To visualize the city’s cultural ecology for communities of color that is, the public art, creative enterprises, museums, theatres, and arts nonprofits located in the city’s majority Black, Latinx, and Asian American neighborhoods.
4) To investigate, through ongoing conversations with Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American artists living and working here, the artist’s role in influencing the upstream drivers of health those structures, systems, environments, policies, and cultural ecosystems that impact community health.
Google Maps, 2022. Nubian Square. Google Maps [online], accessed November 5, 2022.
Google Maps, 2022. Roxbury. Google Maps [online], accessed November 5, 2022.
Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs with his Breathe Life 1 Mural (2017)
Image Credit: Screen Capture of Drone 4k footage by Detached Studio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2XKEpy5pyc)
Nubian Square Black Lives Matter Mural (2020)
— Lee Beard, Paul "Mars" Chapman, Chris Grant, and multiple Roxbury artists
• In 1980, 79% of Roxbury residents identified as Black on the U.S. census. By 2016, that figure had declined to 53%.
• Between 1990 and 2017, many of Boston’s neighborhoods with strong Black and Brown communities—Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, Roxbury, and the South End—experienced a percentage decline in the non-white population share.
• Between 2010 and 2020, the African American/Black share of the total Boston population has decreased by 6.4%, and the American Indian/Alaska Native population has decreased by 19.4% (2020 U.S. Census)
Figure Credit: Changing Faces of Greater Boston (Boston Indicators, Boston Foundation, UMass Boston, & UMass Donahue Institute
Roxbury, Jamaica, Plain, Dorchester, South End, and Fenway-Longwood.
The neighborhoods labeled as Lower Roxbury and Mission Hill are also considered by our research collaborators to be part of Roxbury proper.
Google Maps, 2022. Study Area: Art, Race, and Health Equity in the City of Boston (Northeastern University), Google Maps [online]
• A dot indicates poorer health outcomes than the rest of Boston for at least one health indicator within each domain.
• Dorchester and Roxbury remain majority BIPOC neighborhoods; the South End’s non-white population share totaled 43% in 2020.
Data Sources: Boston Public Health Commission; 2020 U.S. Census
• Neighborhoods with larger Black and Latinx populations experienced higher rates of infections and death.
• In majority white neighborhood, Black residents were more likely to contract and die from COVID.
• In no Boston neighborhood was the COVID infection rate higher among white residents.
Data Source: Boston Public Health Commission
Right: Mask use promotion poster by Shepard Fairey, commissioned by L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti
Left: Khac Hung; Min and Erik’s Viral TikTok Dance Challenge: “Ghen Co Vy ” (Washing Hand Song)
Credit: Stern, Mark J. and Susan C. Seifert. Cultural Asset Mapping Project: Progress Report. University of Pennsylvania (2014)
Google Maps, 2022. Creative Opportunity in the City of Boston, Google Maps [online]
the Future: A Focus Group on the Impacts of Art, Race, and Health”Image Credit: Vania Arroyo
A ny public health study interrogating race must ask those people on whom racial categories are imposed how, exactly, they define race: This will both clarify diversity within the U.S. census’s problematic racial groups and empower interlocutors to identify their communities of belonging.
“My race and ethnicity is I'm Black, you know, African. And I was born and raised in Boston, I'm also like Indian, and I have some Trinni in me, you know, so definitely some islands. I was born and raised in Boston. So, I really am rooted, like, I have a heritage.”
—Jaypix, Photographer
Jaypix portrait credit: Vania Arroyo; Right image credit: Jaypix
“So, like a base level, just like if I'm doing an introduction, I’m Mescalero Apache…What I find more interesting is really looking at race and class and the intersections…I feel like both as an organizer and as an artist, those two things have such a huge impact in our lives that we have to name it. So, I would say I'm Apache straddler class, I've lived straddler class my whole life.” Image Credit: Dorchester Food Co - op (https://www.dorchesterfoodcoop.com /news/blog - post- title - one - l6llg)
Mea Johnson, Artist and Community Organizer
Artists, as keen observers, and impacted members of their community, have much to tell us about the health impacts of involuntary displacement, neighborhood violence, and intergenerational trauma. In some cases, artists are better equipped to articulate environmental stressors that public h ealth commissions may struggle to capture through established indicators, and have important perspective on interventions to influence them.
“I'm fascinated by urban planning…[but] if we're gonna get more open green space for parks for the kids, what does that look like? Is it gonna be safe? Is it gonna be clean? Because when you go in certain neighborhoods, and you want to do an outdoor event, you're like, yeah, I could do it in Jamaica Plain, because I don't have to worry about needles…When you come in Roxbury, we don't have any open space. And if we do, it's not clean.”
Olawumi Akinwumi, Cultural Programs Curator and Deputy Director of Programs, Arts Boston
Image Credit: Vania Arroyo
Any attempt at an arts - based intervention must first ask artists what they need to be healthy and work well.
“I operate in scarcity…I questioned what my value as an artist is if I'm not creating like content that is, you know, attractive to a good amount of the population. So, for me right now, I want to focus on, like, projects that are based on well-being versus achievement. And I think, the way the systems are made, they're prioritizing the economy and other factors instead of our mental wellbeing as a collective. So, I would love to move on as like a Wellness Educator through visual arts.”
Shirley Fang, Painter
Image Credit: Vania Arroyo
starve artists. Do I know what a starving artist looks like? Yes, because I was a starving artist in the beginning. However, you're never starving if you're an artist because you have the ability to create so many different ways of making money that it's endless, really. [But] if you're starving, then that means that you're not creating.”
“We can’t— Amanda Shea, Multi- disciplinary Artist and Artivist Image Credit: Vania Arroyo
We must listen to and learn from artists, as community culture bearers and creative problem - solvers, on how best to define health in their communities and support them to instrumentalize their work for community health .
A healthy community is “a group of people that want to help each other, and their community get better… I think the basis of most communities is like having some sort of shared meaning.”
Image Credit: OJ Slaughter for WBUR (https://www.wbur.org /news/2022/08/25/eph-see-sound-on)
— Eph See, Recording Artist
“I feel like it's cellular, it's like, instinctive, if you give individuals an opportunity to like, either write about themselves, or showcase who they are and what they do…you're gonna learn so much, just from that experience, from seeing the images... And these are individuals who, a lot of the time, they do want to make noise. They are frustrated for certain things, and they do feel a responsibility to use their work or their platform to bring light to whatever they're frustrated about, or whatever they feel like needs to be changed. So maybe that's why all the funding is getting cut. Maybe because they are troublemakers.”
James Pierre, Community arts organizer and founder, The Adius Arts Collective
Aziza with an artist’s family member at “Creating the Future: A Focus Group on the Impacts of Art, Race, and Health.”
Image Credit: Vania Arroyo
Rebekah with hip hop artist Ant Thomas at “Creating the Future: A Focus Group on the Impacts of Art, Race, and Health.”
Image Credit: Vania Arroyo
T.Michael Thomas (aka, The Copper Man) at “Creating the Future: A Focus Group on the Impacts of Art, Race, and Health.” Image Credit: Vania Arroyo
Shirley Fang and Amanda Shea at “Creating the Future: A Focus Group on the Impacts of Art, Race, and Health.”
Image Credit: Vania Arroyo
§ Our Northeastern colleagues and Year 1 contributors: Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Architecture; Alisa Lincoln, Health Sciences/Sociology & Anthropology; Shan Mohammed, Health Sciences; Antonio OcampoGuzman, Theatre; Laura Senier, Sociology & Anthropology/Health Sciences.
§ Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media & Design; College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Bouvé College of Health Sciences; and the School of Law for funding our research.
§ Northeastern’s Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research for years of mentorship and research support—financial, logistical, and spiritual.
§ Most importantly, all artists who have contributed their time, expertise, and creative excellence to our research, and to your Boston communities.
