What are the community arts? How do we build meaningful relationships while expressing our creativity? Could meeting around the arts help bridge abilities and offer authentic connections?
These questions meet at InterArts — a community art center which offers expressive and creative arts as vehicles for building relationships, self-actualizing, and experiencing a shared humanity.
In the Spring of 2023 the Surgeon General of the United States released a health advisory, alarming and urgent: the nation was experiencing increased isolation and loneliness socially, and this was a serious threat to personal health, not to mention the social health our communities and society.
One can be alone on the top of a mountain and not feel lonely or live in the middle of a bustling metropolis and experience loneliness. The feeling of loneliness is subjective, but its health outcomes are not.
At the same time, expressing our voices, sharing our unique stories, and building relationships are increasingly difficult in more digitized and distant forms of communication and gathering. Building friendships and getting to know oneself are both art forms in themselves.
We may each be asking, how can we help? Let us meet, create, and share together.
Creative arts help us shape our voices, and give us a broader, more universal language in which to express our unique experience. Healing Arts give us outlets and techniques to rest, restore, heal, and build stronger bodies and minds. Meeting around the arts, whether dancing, painting, photographing, cooking or making music, provide pivotal outlets for us to share our humanity in ways that cannot entirely be calculated, and yet they increase the quality and meaning of our lives directly.
InterArts is a response to this call, this question, and an answer to offering a meeting place for us to share life together and reflect our experiences, our tastes, our wonder and curiosity in person. Integrating artists of different abilities, ages, backgrounds, and personal styles, we aim to build safe spaces for exploring and sharing our creative practices, and continuing to emphasize social connection and shared expression and listening.
In this way InterArts is itself an artifact, a container, a vessel, an instrument through which others will be able to play, to make, to meet, and to create an artistic life together.
