Our Lonely Nation Needs Teaching Artists
I remember the first time I understood that loneliness can kill.
A friend was telling me about Project Roomkey, created by Los Angeles County during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, to house many of the residents of Skid Row, the largest population of unhoused persons in the US, in empty hotel rooms around Los Angeles. This program was designed to create opportunities for social distancing in Skid Row where humanity is constantly in close contact. It was extremely effective; preventing the spread of COVID-19, but with a cost. The leading cause of death in Skid Row during the early days of the pandemic wasn’t illness, it was overdose. The forced isolation of Project Roomkey led to an increase in loneliness. Separation from their community led people to return to addictions that being in relationship with others had allowed them to begin to recover from.
I was so affected by this story told by my friend, Vijay Gupta, whose organization Street Symphony works closely with people in Skid Row, because I, like many, had been feeling lonely and adrift during the first year of the pandemic. Suddenly, my surface level awareness of the dangers of loneliness changed to a visceral understanding of how hazardous it is to our individual and societal health. I was scared and as a saxophone performer and teacher; I felt completely ill-equipped to help.
US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy characterizes loneliness as a “profound threat to our health and well being” and one of the most significant public health crises facing our country right alongside gun violence. Loneliness, already on the rise over past decades, has been exacerbated by the pandemic. On average, 50% of US adults report feeling lonely at least once per week. In modern society with more ways to connect to each other than at any point in human history, you’d expect us to be less lonely, but the opposite is true.
Loneliness is more than just feeling bad or isolated; it is actually harmful to our physical health. Loneliness is “associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death.” It increases our risk of dying young by up to 45%, more than air pollution, lack of physical exercise, and alcoholism. Living with loneliness has roughly the equivalent impact on our wellbeing to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
A significant driver of our increasing loneliness is our political discourse. Across the political spectrum, we have identified that the easiest way to “win” is to prevent dialogue from happening in the first place. We accomplish this through ad hominem attacks and gaslighting, sewing doubt about the intentions of actors and advocates, and widespread dissemination of misinformation; all of which limit our capacity and will to have hard conversations and engage with each other. We know what the results look like: when we cannot understand someone’s beliefs or it seems as though people we know are living in a different reality from our own.
Our politics magnifies the loneliness we are already feeling. It makes us wonder how we are supposed to create change when all we see and hear is different ideologies trying to actively discredit the other, prevent any dialogue from happening, and win the “argument” at the expense of people who believe differently. The result is a political system that not only resists change but actively impedes our ability to address our collective problems. Most importantly, not only do we doubt that change is possible, but we lack the imagination to envision a different world we want to live in.
Most of the focus after the 2024 presidential election is devoted to diagnosing what went wrong or what went right depending on what “side” of the political spectrum you are on. That’s concerning to me, because it fundamentally misses the most important point: an extremely polarizing election like this only happens when we have no idea how to talk to each other and no tools to collectively come together to solve our problems. That kind of politics begets more loneliness and will be a threat to our health and an impediment to making collective change for the next four years and beyond.
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I first started learning about loneliness and public discourse because I was feeling lonely myself. Right as I finished my training to perform and teach saxophone, the pandemic cut me off from the field I had spent a decade preparing to enter. No longer a student, I lost regular connection with most of my colleagues in the field. Amidst that loneliness, my wife, on to something before me as she typically is, said “I don’t really see you as just a saxophonist.” Like many musicians, I had defined myself by the instrument I play. I’m a saxophonist, my name is Erik. She gave voice to an inconvenient question I couldn’t ignore. What was the point of being a musician in a society that seemed more unrecognizable and in need of connection with every passing day? How did all the time I spent practicing, rehearsing, competing, and performing make a difference in my community? What is the role of artists in modern American society?
Saxophone didn’t answer those questions. The long, difficult, sometimes painful, and ongoing journey to answer that question and understand why I create art, has led me to the field of teaching artistry.
It’s hard to define teaching artistry. It’s existed as part of the arts ecosystem as a distinct profession since the 1970s, but its core values have been part of why humans have made art for our species’ entire history. Eric Booth, often referred to as the father of the teaching artist profession, has called teaching artists the most powerful workforce you’ve never heard of…the sleeping giant of social change. Due to the nebulous and varied nature of our work I’d bet good money that ten different teaching artists would give you ten different definitions.
So why define it at all? Because there’s an essential role in our society for teaching artists: helping to address our loneliness. I’m not going to try and provide a universal or “correct” definition for teaching artists, but I am going to give you mine. Teaching Artists are engineers of possibility.
Teaching artists’ goal is to awaken artistry in someone else. Not artistry in the sense of expertise in a particular instrument or discipline acquired through years of rigorous study, but artistry for all. Artistry as the innate human capacity to make things we care about, to problem solve, and to shape the progress of our society. Everyone has artistry in them.
Teaching artistry is the business of creative engagement. We all are creative in our own way, whether that’s making artwork or making food, creating a meeting agenda or creating a game for your child. We love to interact with possibility. We are wired to wonder: What if? Could this be? Where do we go from here? Engagement defines artistry as something which is communal. The goal is not just to be creative and engage in possibility, but to cultivate relationships between people that last beyond the experience, building community through creativity. Collective, co-created possibility.
As an artist, it’s easy to look at our world and say well art can’t do anything about our loneliness and disconnection. How is art going to enact policy and build coalitions to address the most pressing concerns facing our society? For a long time I asked that question and couldn’t come up with an answer, until I realized it was the wrong question. Art isn’t meant to change minds or enact an agenda. Change happens when we focus on the most basic currency of community: the relationships between people.
There’s a wonderful idea at the center of Peter Block’s book Community, the Structure of Belonging which states that “whatever the world demands of us, the people most involved have the collective wisdom to meet the requirements of that demand…the wisdom to create a future or solve a problem is almost always in the room.” Policy and legislation is a byproduct of ordinary citizens claiming their power to act.
The challenge is that our loneliness and public discourse has left most of us with bleak visions for the future. With that outlook, we struggle to be in relationship with others, ask hard questions, and collaborate on solutions. So the first step towards our own healing is creating compelling narratives that allow us to imagine different possible futures. Narratives rooted not in fact, but in emotion and values, which are much more effective at helping us envision and live into change. That change is the result of our combined innate artistry. We can’t make change alone. Convening communities through collective imagination requires a diverse skill set (one teaching artists have), including, but certainly not limited to, a robust individual creative practice in a particular discipline, small group facilitation, cultural humility, improvisation, and project management. Combine the talents of a community organizer with a deep creative practice and you begin to encompass what teaching artists can do.
I’ve seen the power of teaching artistry to bring people together and help us live into change firsthand. Athens, Georgia has a long history of racial and economic divides between the university, the largest public institution of higher education in the state, and the surrounding community, one of the state’s poorest counties. I was part of a team of teaching artists during the early stages of creating the Athens Hip-Hop Harmonic, bringing together the hip-hop community and university students and faculty to co-create original music and explore the question “how can musical collaborations promote community understanding?” Those original works of music have been shared in the community and on campus in places that diverse audiences never felt welcome before. While not the original goal, the project has led to positive dialogue and connected community that is the engine for a better relationship between the university and Athens going forward. All because collective music making convened by teaching artists opened the conversation.
I defined teaching artists earlier as “engineers of possibility”. Their skill set allows them to tap into their own creative practice to awaken artistry in someone else. They have the tools to help us come together and imagine a different story for our future, starting one classroom, neighborhood porch, or community center at a time. Those co-created possible futures are how we begin to address our systemic loneliness and toxic public discourse.
Teaching artistry taps into what sociologist C. Wright Mills defines as sociological imagination or the ability to “link private troubles with public issues.” Art at its best expands our sense of self to something larger than we currently know; it allows us to experience stories other than our own. Teaching artists thrive in building creative experiences that lead to communal change, moving us from what is to what might be.
Our loneliness and political discourse has resulted in a society where we don’t know how to be in dialogue or relationship with each other, especially across differing political, cultural, and ideological values. In the face of this crisis of connection, it’s easy to feel hopeless; that the art we make can’t resolve our differences or bring us together. However, this is precisely the movement when creatives and teaching artists are called to build community in the way that we uniquely can. At its core art is about hope and the ability to imagine the world differently and our future capacity for hope is directly linked with our current capacity for creativity. Put another way: engineering possibility.
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