City-Wide Open Studios 2018 Curatorial Prompt: Wellbeing

Each year, Artspace proposes a prompt to focus our creative energies and excitement around the production of our annual City-Wide Open Studios festival. Over the past four years, this word or phrase has mobilized a series of artistic interrogations around a topical issue that impacts our daily lives, lived environments, and the legacies we inherit, embody, and project. This year, we sense the need to bolster our community’s capacity for resiliency in the face of acute and long term struggle, violence and trauma, and dedicate this year’s festival to recognizing the creative ways we work to provide care for one another.

These currents underscore the need for expanded thinking beyond (and in addition to) mainstream forms of healthcare education and patient services, and we believe the arts offer a unique window through which to examine issues of health, wellness, and mindfulness as they relate to our bodies, minds, and the environment. For these varied reasons, our 2018 prompt will be Wellbeing. We hope this prompt will encourage the development of proposals that think about our past systems of healthcare provision, so that we might begin to account for where we stand today, and work towards greater healthcare security in the future.

The new location for Artspace’s 2018 alternative space will help connect artists and audiences to practitioners working in the healthcare field. We will move from the Goffe Street Armory to a vacant building attached to the Yale School of Nursing and numerous Institutes connecting health science, cultural heritage, energy, and the environment at Yale’s West Campus, which straddles West Haven and Orange. This is a link to the West Campus map–CWOS will take place in Building 410. More about West Campus is available here.