Cozzens created the project as part of Project HEAL (Health. Equity. Art. Learning.), a three-year framework through which trained artists can help communities identify their health priorities and unearth complex issues through sometimes tough conversations. Ultimately, Project HEAL uses the arts to enable communities to work toward health equity, hand-in-hand with policymakers, health care institutions, nonprofits, and others.
What Artists Can Do
This approach can work anywhere because every community has artists: choir directors, dance instructors, musicians, painters, poets, photographers. In Louisville, Project HEAL has shown how artists are able to do four things:
Create opportunities for a shared vision of a healthier, more connected future.
Artists who are connected to the community can lift up unheard voices and channel them into equitable policymaking. More than that, they can offer hope. And hope heals. Cozzens’ project, for example, was about more than creating a sculpture. Friends and family came together to discuss shared experiences and how trauma impacts their community, with an eye toward a future where violence and lack of opportunities don’t hold residents back. Cozzens is continuing to create rods, and plans to turn the piece into a temporary outdoor art installation. Through this artwork, policymakers and community stakeholders will be able to see how neighborhoods like Smoketown are disproportionately impacted by incarceration and other traumatic experiences. We hope this will spur them into finding more ways to improve conditions within the community.
Bring neighbors together and give them tools for facing and addressing adversity.
Artists Greg Acker and Hamidou Koivogui held weekly drum circles in Smoketown last summer. In August, a shooting happened a few blocks away just 45 minutes before the drum circle started. Whether they knew the victim or not, participants looked to the circle for healing, a release for their anger at another young life being taken, and support from others who were grieving. The presence of art and community spirit in the neighborhood that day offered an outlet for grief, bringing people together in a way that our artists hope to build on for future projects.