Community Arts and Social Healing

Overview

Community arts — creative practices that are rooted in, created by, and accountable to specific communities — occupy a unique space between professional art-making and therapeutic intervention. They are not therapy in the clinical sense, nor are they art in the gallery sense. They are something that predates both categories: the fundamental human practice of creating together as a way of being together. When a community choir sings in a village hall, when neighbors paint a mural on a barricaded building, when a cultural festival fills streets with music and color, something happens that neither individual therapy nor solitary art can produce — a collective experience of beauty, belonging, and shared meaning that heals the social body.

The evidence for community arts’ health and healing benefits has grown substantially in recent decades. The landmark Creative Health report (2017), commissioned by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing in the United Kingdom, reviewed over 700 studies and concluded that arts engagement is associated with improved mental and physical health, reduced social isolation, enhanced community cohesion, and reduced healthcare utilization. The World Health Organization’s 2019 scoping review of over 3,000 studies reached similar conclusions, establishing definitively that arts participation contributes to the prevention of ill health and the promotion of well-being.

This article examines the major forms of community arts practice — muralism, community singing, participatory arts, arts on prescription, cultural festivals — and their evidence bases. It explores the mechanisms through which community arts heal (social connection, meaning-making, collective efficacy, stress reduction) and examines specific cultural traditions, including Vietnamese community arts, that demonstrate the deep roots of these practices in human civilization.

Muralism and Public Art

The Political Mural Tradition

Muralism — large-scale paintings on walls and public surfaces — has served political, cultural, and healing functions across cultures and centuries. The Mexican muralist movement (Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros), born from the Mexican Revolution, demonstrated that public art could educate, inspire, and unite communities around shared histories and aspirations. This tradition influenced mural movements worldwide, from the Black Arts Movement murals in Chicago’s South Side to the political murals of Belfast and Derry, from the Chicano Park murals in San Diego to the community murals of Sao Paulo.

Community murals differ from murals painted by individual artists on public buildings in a crucial way: they are created collaboratively by community members, with professional artists serving as facilitators rather than sole creators. The process of creating a mural — identifying themes, gathering community input, designing together, painting together — is often as important as the finished product. The mural becomes a visual representation of the community’s collective identity, values, and aspirations, visible daily to everyone who passes by.

Healing Through Public Art

Research on community mural projects has documented effects on community cohesion, sense of belonging, civic engagement, and neighborhood revitalization. A study of the Mural Arts Program in Philadelphia — the largest public art program in the United States, which has facilitated the creation of over 4,000 murals since 1984 — found that neighborhoods with mural projects showed reductions in crime, increases in property values, and improvements in resident well-being and civic participation.

The healing function of public art extends to memorialization — murals commemorating community tragedies, victims of violence, or historical injustices. These memorial murals serve as sites for collective mourning, identity affirmation, and resistance against erasure. They make invisible suffering visible and claim public space for stories that dominant narratives exclude.

Community Singing and Choirs

The Neuroscience of Singing Together

Singing is unique among human activities in its combination of physical engagement (breath support, vocal production, postural alignment), emotional expression (music’s direct access to limbic processing), social synchronization (matching pitch, rhythm, and dynamics with others), and cognitive demand (reading or remembering lyrics, tracking musical structure). When people sing together, their heart rates synchronize, their breathing patterns align, and their brains release a cocktail of neurochemicals that promote bonding, pleasure, and well-being.

Research has documented specific physiological effects of group singing: reductions in cortisol (the stress hormone), increases in oxytocin (the bonding hormone), increases in immunoglobulin A (IgA, a marker of immune function), and activation of the vagus nerve (which promotes parasympathetic relaxation and social engagement). A study by Kreutz and colleagues (2004) found that choir singers showed significant increases in positive affect and IgA after rehearsal, while passive listening to the same music did not produce these effects — suggesting that active music-making, not just music exposure, is necessary for the full range of benefits.

Community Choir Research

The UK has been a leader in research on community singing, partly due to the success of programs like the Silver Song Clubs (community singing for older adults), the Military Wives Choir, and Sing for Your Life (choral singing for people with chronic respiratory conditions). Clift and colleagues’ multi-site study of community choirs found significant improvements in well-being, with participants reporting benefits in six domains: well-being and relaxation, breathing and posture, social benefits, spiritual benefits, emotional benefits, and benefits for the heart and immune system.

For people experiencing social isolation — older adults, refugees, individuals with mental health conditions — community choirs offer a particularly powerful intervention because they combine the health benefits of singing with the social benefits of belonging to a group. The threshold for participation is low (no auditions, no previous experience required), and the shared experience of creating music together produces rapid social bonding that can be difficult to achieve through other means.

Singing and Respiratory Health

Research has demonstrated specific benefits of singing for respiratory conditions, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma. Singing requires controlled breathing — deep inhalation, sustained exhalation, management of breath pressure — that exercises the respiratory musculature in ways similar to pulmonary rehabilitation. The Singing for Breathing program in the UK, evaluated in multiple studies, has shown improvements in respiratory function, exercise capacity, and quality of life for people with COPD, with effects comparable to conventional pulmonary rehabilitation.

Participatory Arts and Health

The Creative Health Report

The Creative Health report (2017), produced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing in the UK, represents the most comprehensive synthesis of evidence for arts and health to date. Its key findings include: arts engagement is associated with improved mental health (reduced depression, anxiety, and stress), improved physical health (enhanced immune function, reduced pain, improved cardiovascular indicators), reduced social isolation, delayed onset of dementia, and reduced healthcare utilization (fewer GP visits, fewer prescriptions, shorter hospital stays).

The report called for the integration of arts into healthcare systems through “social prescribing” — the referral of patients by healthcare providers to community arts and other non-clinical activities as a complement to medical treatment. This recommendation reflected a growing recognition that many health problems — particularly those driven by loneliness, meaninglessness, inactivity, and chronic stress — are better addressed through community engagement than through medication alone.

WHO Scoping Review

The World Health Organization’s 2019 report What is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Well-being? reviewed over 3,000 studies and concluded that arts engagement contributes to: the prevention of ill health (through reducing risk factors including social isolation, physical inactivity, and chronic stress); the promotion and management of mental health conditions; the support of care for neurological disorders; and the management of noncommunicable diseases. The report identified causal pathways including psychological (emotional regulation, self-efficacy, meaning-making), physiological (stress hormone reduction, immune enhancement), social (reduced isolation, enhanced cohesion), and behavioral (increased physical activity, health information acquisition).

Arts on Prescription

Social Prescribing Models

Arts on prescription (also called “arts referral” or “cultural prescribing”) is a social prescribing model in which healthcare providers refer patients to community arts activities — painting, pottery, singing, writing, dance, theater — as a complement to medical treatment. The model typically involves a link worker (a non-clinical coordinator who helps patients access community activities), a menu of available arts activities, and an evaluation process that tracks health outcomes.

Research on arts on prescription programs has shown significant improvements in mental health (reductions in depression and anxiety scores), social outcomes (increased social contact, reduced loneliness, new friendships), well-being (improved life satisfaction, sense of purpose), and healthcare utilization (reductions in GP consultations and prescription medication). A cost-benefit analysis of the Artlift program in Gloucestershire found a return of approximately 4 GBP for every 1 GBP invested, through reduced GP visits and prescription costs.

Challenges and Critiques

Critics of arts on prescription note several challenges: the difficulty of maintaining program quality across diverse providers, the risk of “medicalization” of arts (framing creative engagement as a treatment rather than a fundamental human right), the underfunding of community arts organizations (which are expected to deliver health outcomes with limited resources), and the challenge of reaching those who could benefit most (socially isolated individuals who are least likely to self-refer).

Cultural Festivals as Healing

The Festival Function

Cultural festivals — from Mardi Gras to Diwali, from Tet Nguyen Dan to Day of the Dead, from harvest festivals to solstice celebrations — serve functions that extend far beyond entertainment. They mark the passage of time, honor the dead, celebrate the living, reinforce cultural identity, strengthen community bonds, provide legitimate outlets for excess and transgression, and create shared experiences of beauty and joy that sustain communities through hardship.

Victor Turner’s concept of “communitas” — the spontaneous feeling of equality, togetherness, and shared humanity that emerges in liminal ritual contexts — captures something essential about festival experience. When a community dances together in the street, when thousands of lanterns float on a river, when an entire neighborhood gathers for a shared meal — the boundaries that normally separate individuals dissolve temporarily into a collective experience that refreshes the social body.

Research on Festival Well-Being

Research on the health and well-being effects of festival participation, while limited, supports the hypothesis that festivals contribute to community health. Studies have documented increases in social trust, sense of belonging, and positive affect during and after festival participation, with effects strongest for individuals who are socially isolated or who actively participate (rather than merely observing). The Edinburgh festivals, studied extensively by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, have been shown to contribute to social capital, cultural vitality, and civic pride.

Vietnamese Community Arts Traditions

Festivals and Communal Celebration

Vietnamese culture is rich in community arts traditions that serve healing and bonding functions. Tet Nguyen Dan (Lunar New Year) is the most significant annual festival, involving family reunions, ancestor veneration, communal feasting, lion dances (múa lân), fireworks, and the exchange of gifts and well-wishes. The festival’s rituals — cleaning the house, paying debts, reconciling quarrels, making offerings at the family altar — explicitly serve a restorative function, marking a collective transition from the burdens of the old year to the possibilities of the new.

The Mid-Autumn Festival (Tet Trung Thu), originally a harvest celebration, has evolved into a children’s festival featuring lantern processions, moon cake sharing, and lion dances. The communal experience of children parading through streets with star lanterns (đèn ông sao) while drums and cymbals sound creates a collective joy that bonds communities across generations.

Water Puppetry and Folk Performance

Water puppetry (múa rối nước), unique to Vietnam’s northern delta region, dates back approximately 1,000 years. Performances take place on flooded rice paddies or purpose-built water stages, with puppeteers hidden behind a screen manipulating wooden puppets on long bamboo poles beneath the water’s surface. The performances depict scenes from rural life, historical legends, and mythological stories, accompanied by live music played on traditional instruments.

Water puppetry serves multiple community functions: preserving cultural heritage and historical memory, providing communal entertainment and social bonding, transmitting values and knowledge to younger generations, and maintaining connections to the agricultural rhythms and natural environment that have shaped Vietnamese identity for millennia.

Quan Họ and Communal Singing

Quan họ, the folk singing tradition of Bắc Ninh Province, involves antiphonal (call-and-response) singing between groups of men and women from neighboring villages. The songs express themes of love, friendship, and communal identity, and the singing events serve as occasions for social bonding between villages. UNESCO designated Quan họ as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009, recognizing its role in maintaining social cohesion and cultural identity.

Vietnamese ca trù (ceremonial singing) and hát chèo (folk opera) similarly combine artistic excellence with community bonding, cultural preservation, and emotional expression. These traditions demonstrate that “community arts” are not a modern invention but a fundamental human practice that Vietnamese culture has sustained and developed over centuries.

Clinical/Practical Applications

Community arts practices can be integrated into clinical and public health programs through social prescribing models, arts-based wellness programs, community development initiatives, and therapeutic community building. Healthcare providers can recommend community arts participation as a complement to treatment for depression, anxiety, social isolation, chronic pain, and other conditions where social connection and meaningful activity are therapeutic. Community organizations can develop arts programming that is explicitly designed to promote health and well-being while maintaining artistic quality and cultural authenticity.

Key implementation principles include: building on existing community strengths and cultural traditions rather than imposing external programs; ensuring accessibility (financial, physical, cultural, linguistic); involving community members in program design and governance; maintaining artistic quality (people can tell when a program is “dumbed down” and resent it); and evaluating outcomes that matter to participants, not just funders.

Four Directions Integration

• Serpent (Physical/Body): Community arts engage the body — singing requires breath and vocal production, mural painting requires whole-body movement, dance engages every muscle and system. These physical engagements produce measurable physiological effects: cortisol reduction, oxytocin increase, immune enhancement, cardiovascular benefit. The body in community arts is not an isolated organism but a social body — connected to other bodies through synchronized movement, shared rhythm, and physical proximity.

• Jaguar (Emotional/Heart): Community arts are emotional practices — they give collective expression to grief (memorial murals, requiems), joy (festivals, celebrations), anger (protest art, political theater), and love (communal singing, gift-giving). The emotional power of community arts derives from the combination of artistic expression and social witnessing — creating something beautiful together and sharing the experience of that beauty.

• Hummingbird (Soul/Mind): Community arts make meaning collectively — they tell stories about who we are, where we came from, what we value, and what we aspire to. Murals declare identity. Songs carry history. Festivals enact cosmological narratives. Cultural festivals like Tet reconnect communities to ancestral wisdom and cosmic rhythms. This collective meaning-making is soul work at the community level.

• Eagle (Spirit): The transcendent dimension of community arts is found in the experience of communitas — the dissolution of individual boundaries into shared creative experience. When a choir’s voices merge into harmony, when a festival crowd moves as one, when a community creates beauty together — something larger than any individual is present. This is the spiritual dimension of community arts: the lived experience of interconnection that all spiritual traditions point toward.

Cross-Disciplinary Connections

Community arts connect to public health (social determinants of health, health promotion), sociology (social capital, community development, social cohesion), anthropology (ritual, festival, cultural performance), urban planning (placemaking, creative cities, public space), education (community-based learning, cultural education), psychology (well-being, flow, collective efficacy), economics (creative economy, social return on investment), and political science (cultural policy, participatory democracy). The field also intersects with disability arts, migrant arts, indigenous arts preservation, and environmental arts.

Key Takeaways

• Community arts — creative practices rooted in and created by specific communities — produce health and well-being benefits documented in over 3,000 studies
• Community singing reduces cortisol, increases oxytocin and IgA, and provides respiratory, emotional, and social benefits simultaneously
• The Creative Health report and WHO scoping review establish arts engagement as a legitimate public health intervention
• Arts on prescription programs show significant improvements in mental health, social outcomes, and healthcare utilization at favorable cost-benefit ratios
• Cultural festivals serve healing functions through communitas, social bonding, temporal marking, and collective meaning-making
• Vietnamese community arts traditions — water puppetry, Quan họ singing, Tet celebrations — demonstrate the deep roots of community arts in human civilization
• Community muralism combines artistic creation with community cohesion, identity affirmation, and neighborhood revitalization

References and Further Reading

• All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing. (2017). Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing. London.
• Fancourt, D., & Finn, S. (2019). What is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Well-being? World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe.
• Kreutz, G., Bongard, S., Rohrmann, S., Hodapp, V., & Grebe, D. (2004). Effects of choir singing or listening on secretory immunoglobulin A, cortisol, and emotional state. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 27(6), 623-635.
• Clift, S., Hancox, G., Morrison, I., et al. (2010). Choral singing and psychological wellbeing: Quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey. Journal of Applied Arts & Health, 1(1), 19-34.
• Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine.
• Lowe, S. S. (2000). Creating community: Art for community development. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 29(3), 357-386.
• Golden, T. L., Maier, M., & Brocchi, F. (2019). Community arts and social transformation: Findings from a critical review. In Oxford Handbook of Community Arts.
• UNESCO. (2009). Quan Họ Bắc Ninh folk songs: Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
• Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster.