The Arts' Role in Community Weil-Being.

• Position: PUBLIC HEALTH

From anti-tobacco ads starting in the 1970s, to the musical "Rent," to a surge of coronavirus-inspired street art, public health topics are woven throughout arts and culture. "Some of the big issues we work on as public health professionals--like inequities, racism, poverty, violence against women--artists are also working on in a different way, but the end goal for both of us is to improve community health and well-being," says Amy Ferketich, professor of epidemiology at Ohio State University.

Students will explore how these themes cross disciplines through a new minor in public health and the arts. "My hope is that students will have that matrix moment that the arts and public health are as natural a pair as peanut butter and jelly--that they will be able to see new ways of doing public health," says Julia Nelson Hawkins, associate professor of classics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The arts have a way of reaching people on a deeper level than traditional public health messages, she indicates, recalling the famous street mural "Crack Is Wack," painted by artist Keith Haring in Harlem in the 1980s, noting that many people found this anti-drug message more powerful than Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign of the era. Located near a highway, the "Crack Is Wack" mural was "at the...