"With Art, we are not alone."

Visit a museum

This quote, is etched in my heart: "With Art, we are not alone." I've written it in my journals numerous times. Sometimes, in more negative moments, I write, "Without art, we are alone."¹

I've always known then, but it the heart of COVID a scientific study was published that proves it, particularly visiting an Art Museum.

In an interview with PBS, postdoctoral fellow Katherine Cotter states:

“It wasn’t just, ‘I look at this artwork and it makes me happy,’ it’s thinking about broader things that facilitate other well-being and flourishing outcomes,” she said. “We know that loneliness and social isolation is a precedent to a host of negative health consequences and outcomes.”

A 2021 exhibit of the work of Jasper Johns at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

I am going to this exhibit, this week:

Courtesy of SLCC

Simply seeing this image online, doesn't cut it, I want to enter with intention and engage in the different mindsets and cognitive processes, and embrace how we are "interrelated in the world more broadly."

I encourage you to visit a museum also: With Art, We Are Not Alone.

You are not alone.

1. In Paperdolls & Cowboy Boots, I write about a conversation I had with my co-author Carol. I told her that I didn't think I made that quote up. We both tried to find who said it, I thought Robert Browning at one point. But, we couldn't find it. We finally decided that I wrote it, probably in my journals from college.