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The Ruby is a catalyst for creativity and a home for making art at Duke.

The Art of Mental Health:
Call for Artists

Published By Duke Arts
Published on: August 16, 2019

Artists are invited to submit an original work that highlights mental health and wellness, with a specific focus on leveraging strengths, sources of resilience, or cultivating emotional well-being.

Featured image: Stacy Crabill: Patience is Bitter, 2019, mixed media (detail).

Artists are invited to submit an original work that highlights mental health and wellness, with a specific focus on leveraging strengths, sources of resilience, or cultivating emotional well-being. Each work will be accompanied by a brief story describing how the work (either the subject matter or the process of creating it) showcases active efforts toward wellness.

About the Exhibit

Maintaining our mental health and wellness requires intentional work, and this effort reflects both science and art. The science of mental health refers to research about factors that generally contribute to improved well-being—such as exercise, consistent sleep, being in nature, engaging in enjoyable activities, and doing things that give us a sense of accomplishment. The art of mental health is determining which specific factors are important to our own unique sense of wellness. The art of mental health is experimenting and determining what works for us as individuals to improve or maintain our emotional wellness.

In this exhibit, we will showcase visual artwork that highlights active efforts toward creating or maintaining mental health and wellness. We will curate an exhibit that displays many unique and personalized interpretations of the art of mental health, with a specific focus on leveraging strengths, sources of resilience, and cultivating emotional well-being. Each work will be accompanied by a brief story describing how the work (either the subject matter or the process of creating it) showcases active efforts toward wellness. This will be a community-involved exhibit, promoting artwork from local artists and engaging the public to contemplate mental health and wellness.

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