A Healthy Appreciation of Creativity: Denver Arts Week Will Nourish Body and Soul With New Programming

Denver’s outdoorsy culture encourages a healthy lifestyle, with plenty of opportunities for hiking, biking and eating balanced meals. But even some of this town’s biggest fitness fanatics might not realize that you can also feed yourself with the arts.

No, really. It’s been scientifically proven that making and engaging with art can reduce stress, improve cognitive function, help manage chronic pain, lower blood pressure and much more. Take a bite out of that, or at least try a sample at this year’s Denver Arts Week, which has added “Art & Well-Being” as a pillar of the nineteenth annual celebration of the city’s cultural scene.

“As a city defined by health and wellness through outdoor adventure and mindful living, Denver also recognizes arts and culture as a vital part of community well-being,” says Caroline Campbell, communications manager for Visit Denver, which organizes Denver Arts Week. “It aims to build new audiences for local artists, galleries, museums, theaters and cultural venues by offering special programming and free or discounted admission, so everyone can experience incredible arts and culture across the city.”

From November 7 through November 16, Denver Arts Week will highlight more than 600 events representing nearly 220 participating organizations. Several of those events are part of a program called “Flourishing Through the Arts and Science,” and Shannon Robinson, who started that initiative, hopes that the new focus will lead to more awareness, improved arts funding, and maybe even policy changes regarding arts education.

“We’ve fallen into this myth that the arts are a luxury, not a necessity,” Robinson says. “It’s always the very first thing that gets cut.”

She’s not wrong. Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities rescinded grants around the country as the agencies were ordered to redirect their focus under the Trump administration. As a result, more than twenty Colorado arts organizations lost over $400,000 as large chunks of the more than $11 million that would have been awarded to Colorado Humanities and other state cultural organizations, such as universities and museums, suddenly disappeared.

Meanwhile, new research is showing just how important the arts are. “We’re wired for the arts, the arts are good for us, and the arts are perhaps one of the most powerful modes of promoting physical, mental, social and spiritual health,” Robinson says. “I’m hoping that this will radically change the dialogue about arts when it comes to public funding, provision of arts in health care and our artists who need to be supported.”

She points to research outlined in the 2023 book Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, as well as the rapidly developing field of neuroarts, which studies how the arts change our brains, behaviors and bodies in beneficial ways.

Robinson recounts how opera singer Renée Fleming underwent MRI scans while singing, speaking and imagining singing — all while researchers watched her brain light up. The study showed that her brain was most activated while she was singing. Because music activates so many parts of the brain, music therapy can often be beneficial for people with Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

Art therapy has been shown to improve cognitive function, reduce stress and aid in conflict resolution, according to Husson University. More than 50 percent of U.S. hospitals now offer arts programming, and that percentage is rising, according to Americans for the Arts. The Colorado Resiliency Arts Lab is a multi-disciplinary group of researchers, doctors, artists and therapists conducting research with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, the Ponzio Creative Arts Therapy Program at Children’s Hospital Colorado, Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the NEA to explore the psychological benefits of creative arts in Colorado.

According to research in the National Library of Medicine by Frontiers in Psychology, dance and movement therapy was found to decrease depression and anxiety and increase quality of life and cognitive and motor skills. When its expansion is completed early next year, Denver’s Cleo Parker Robinson Dance will feature a healing arts center with a theater, movement studios, multidisciplinary arts classrooms and more.

“Right now, the research resides within the halls of academia, laboratories, and it’s exploding in health-care facilities around the world,” Robinson says. “All this research is affecting architecture, art therapy programs and art in public spaces. But we want to make sure that everybody, not just people who happen to be in health-care facilities or patients or staff, knows about it.”

Through the nonprofit she founded in 1999, Windows to the Divine, Robinson’s been gathering research about the health benefits of the arts and sharing that information. Last November, Windows to the Divine held a salon on the health benefits of the arts at Gallery 1261, where several organizations offered presentations to an enthusiastic audience.

As a result, Robinson says, she created the Flourishing Through the Arts and Science council “so we can have all these representatives involved, and try to initiate a series of events on a city-wide basis and convert this to a public health initiative.”

Chaired by Robinson, the council includes artist representative Jane Hunt and representatives from the Art Students League of Denver, Colorado Ballet, the Denver Art Museum, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Gallery 1261, CU Anschutz Center for Bioethics and Humanities, Visit Denver and Windows to the Divine.

Many of these organizations will offer free lectures, presentations, performances, exhibitions, tours and more as part of the Flourishing programming during Denver Arts Week.

“Studies show that regular arts participation — both making and engaging with art — can contribute to positive changes in the health and well-being of adults,” says Heather Nielsen, deputy director and chief learning and engagement officer at the DAM. “It was natural for us to partner with the Flourishing Through the Arts and Science programming, given our alignment around how critical art and creativity are for a healthy and thriving community.”

On Thursday, November 6, the CU Anschutz Medical Campus will open the initiative with a tour of Dr. S. Abbas Shobeiri’s art exhibition, Do You See Me? The Art of Maternal Pelvic Health, Healing, and Advocacy, as well as a panel discussion, “Harnessing the Arts to Promote Wellness.” Later, participants can tour the art collection at Benson Hotel, “a wonderful example of what hotel art should be doing,” Robinson says.

The Denver Art Museum will host “Arts & Whole Person Health: Prescriptions for the Future,” an introduction to neuroarts by Emmeline Edwards, research director of Neuroarts Blueprint, along with a creative arts therapy storytelling demonstration. That will be followed by a reception at Gallery 1261.

And that’s just the first day of the programming.

“Our last event is going to be an interdisciplinary experience for the audience at the Denver Art Museum on November 16,” Robinson notes. “We’re going to have three different paintings that will also be in the Flourishing exhibition at Gallery 1261. They will be the subject of this guided experience.”

The paintings will be displayed one at a time, as a pianist and dancers from Colorado Ballet respond to the visual art with music and dance; audience members will be given materials to sketch their reaction. “They can write down thoughts, words, they can draw, they can do any kind of reaction they’re having to the art experience,” Robinson says. “And then at the end of the hour and a half, if people would like to, they can leave those papers that they’ve sketched on, and the art museum is going to put them all together in a big collage.”

Robinson would like to see Flourishing Through the Arts and Science become a regular part of Denver Arts Week, with more events added every year.

“I really, truly believe that we need to resurrect the term ‘patron of the arts,'” Robinson says. “It has such a stodgy old name that was connected with wealth, when in fact I want to invite the public to realize we are all patrons of the arts to some extent, when we read a book, when we watch a movie. I want to turn it on its head and stop thinking about the arts as this orphan silo or aside of life, when the arts are central to the lives of every person…or should be.”

While engaging with the arts can promote mental and physical health, Robinson notes that it is also a way to bring communities together, which benefits social health. “One of the biggest issues we see today is that people are so increasingly isolated and lonely,” she says. “The arts bring us together; they also allow us to express ourselves so that we don’t act out in ways that are violent or unhealthy.”

The DAM and other local arts institutions plan to continue their health-related art programming, like Mindful Looking, which invites art museum visitors to slow down and spend time with a single work of art on the third Tuesday of each month. “Savoring and mindfulness are essential qualities to promoting positive well-being, and museums like the DAM have built programs that utilize meditation and mindfulness as a way to engage with works of art,” Nielsen says.

Artists have enjoyed the benefits of being creative for centuries, and now science is confirming the real ways that interacting with and making art can improve physical and mental health — whether it’s doodling in your notebook, turning the radio on or dancing in your living room. “The arts are like exercise and diet,” Robinson says. “They need to be incorporated into our daily rituals.”

Flourishing Through the Arts and Science runs from November 6-16; get the full schedule and RSVP for events on windowstothedivine.org. For the Denver Arts Week calendar, click here.