Has Art Healed Your Community? Share Your Story with Athena
Art Credit: Destanie Hirzel, Campaign Logo by Dakota Harlow
If you don’t have time to enjoy a brilliant story right now, scroll to the bottom of this page where you will find the submission details for our 2026 #ArtHealsCommunities campaign! We will be accepting submissions HERE from August 25 – September 27. But if you need some inspiration or have ever wondered who in the world finds community healing while listening to Beethoven, we invite you to continue reading …
Why I Always Listen to Beethoven
About Vanessa
Vanessa Wu recently earned her Master of Social Work from the University of Denver. In her previous careers, she worked in international aid and development in Central Africa and Haiti and then as a writer, editor, and factchecker at the Taipei Times. She joined Athena Project over a year ago as the Community Outreach Coordinator, a role that allows her to combine her passion for the arts, Denver, talking to strangers, and finding every dollar she can to fund the arts.
I really, really love classical music. I’m not talking about “I like to put Mozart on while I’m taking a relaxing bath.” I mean obsession. I mean that sheet music is included in my go bag. Yes, in the case that pianos are just hanging around during the zombie apocalypse, I can play a few tunes and then use the paper as tinder. I once entered an air conducting (is that redundant?) contest and lost. But I truly enjoyed bouncing around to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony with full-on face paint, a giant black tutu, and a single red chopstick as my baton. And then there was the infamous meltdown in the red-carpeted lobby of Boston’s Symphony Hall. After realizing I’d missed the beginning of my favorite piano concerto being performed by my favorite pianist that I had flown cross-country to see in the freezing February weather, I yelled the F-bomb several times until Jason, the lovely man pictured to the right, generously took pity on me and snuck me into the performance. Not really the kind of behavior you’d hope to display in one of the world’s most revered concert halls. Thankfully, I was not sent to orchestra jail.
Vanessa Wu and Jason Lyon, Director of Front of House, Boston Symphony Orchestra
Being a classical music lover of this magnitude can be a lonely life indeed. This particular musical genre seems to be overlooked entirely, reluctantly tolerated, or viewed with disdain as a hobby of the snobby (and gray-haired) elite. So I attend concerts alone as my very own community of one, a circumstance that imitates the rest of my life. I am the only daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who moved to Texas in the 1970s. I was diagnosed with severe OCD when I was 17, and fighting this mental illness has been the most grueling and isolating journey of my life. I’ve lived by myself on four different continents for months and years at a time and have been unpartnered and childfree for much of my adult life. Traditional community happenings–church cookouts, neighborhood block parties, everyone rooting for the same college football team–were things I only knew about from watching cheesy 90s TV shows. Instead, like many others who exist within and between multiple cultures, finding community has been tricky for me, so I’ve had to get a little creative.
About a decade ago, I saw Not By Bread Alone, a play performed by the world’s first and only ensemble of deaf-blind actors, whose story is told through the act of preparing, kneading, and baking bread live on stage. For me, the play was not only a unique piece of art, but a master class on community-building, cooperation, and what it means to truly belong. If this group of individuals could–literally and figuratively–find each other, then perhaps there was hope that I too could find a tribe of my own.
A few years later, I was living and working as a journalist in Taipei, Taiwan, and a colleague asked me to go to the opera with him. I sat stunned while watching a Taiwanese and South Korean cast perform an Italian opera–I had simply assumed that it would be an American or European company on the stage. And it was not just any Italian opera, mind you, it was Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, which features O mio babbino caro, arguably the most famous aria in all of opera. Hearing Taiwanese soprano Lee Chia-jun’s tender rendition of this beloved song, I cried tears of joy and awe, of recognition and possibility. This music I loved was no longer a distant art form sung in a foreign language by people who look nothing like me. For the first time, opera felt like it belonged to me too.
View of Chautauqua Park where the auditorium is located.
Fast forward to my present life in Denver, Colorado, where I have lived for the past four years. I can think of few other places in the world where art and nature blend so seamlessly. Where else could you soak up a Brahms piano concerto while the leaves rustle, the mountains envelop you, and a chipmunk boldly sprints across the stage, much to the audience’s delight? And Beethoven’s 9th Symphony hits differently when it’s performed at the Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder, an intimate mountainside venue that seats a couple hundred people at most (and is one of the few chautauquas left in the United States).
Sitting by myself in the front row as fifty chorists belted out “Ode to Joy,” I thought of a young Beethoven, so inspired by this poem’s themes of human fellowship and universal brotherhood that he waited forty years to create the right music with which to express it. And he did just that in revolutionary fashion with his colossal Ninth Symphony, which he conducted at its world premiere in Vienna in 1824. By that time, he was completely deaf.
Tenor Issachah Savage, second from the right, and conductor Peter Oundjian in the center on the podium.
Remembering how he had to be gently turned around so that he could physically see the audience’s rapturous reaction to his final symphony, I cried. So did the Spanish woman to my right and the Italian man on my left, as did Issachah Savage, the spectacular tenor who, in this tiny venue, was almost at eye-level with those of us in the front row. His teary eyes locked with ours in a moment of spontaneous connection between four total strangers that Beethoven himself could not have better orchestrated. And a community was born.
More than a century later, “Ode to Joy” would become the official anthem of the European Union–the entity that has played a crucial role in preserving peace on the continent after two disastrous world wars. See what I mean? Even European bureaucrats know that it’s always a good idea to listen to Beethoven.
Thank you so much for reading! I hope to meet many of you at upcoming Athena Project events in Denver. Have an idea about connecting YOUR community to Athena? Hit me up at vwu@athenaprojectarts.org. And don’t forget to scroll down and submit your own story of how #ArtHeals Communities!
P.S. Here are a few of my all-time classical music favorites to keep you company as you craft your submissions: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 (Adagietto), Sibelius Violin Concerto, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons, Michael Nyman, and pretty much anything by Abel Korzeniowski.
Your Turn: How Has Art Healed a Community You Know?
Athena Project’s annual #ArtHeals campaign shares personal experiences of healing through the arts from women, trans, and/or nonbinary people. This year, our focus is collective: how does ART HEAL COMMUNITIES?
And by community, we mean it broadly—a neighborhood, cultural group, classroom, choir, survivor community, faith community, disability community, or simply a group of people connected by a shared experience.
If art has helped people find one another, endure something together, reclaim something, celebrate, grieve, or simply feel less alone, we want to hear about it.
What Could You Submit?
Maybe it was…
- a mural that helped a neighborhood tell its story;
- a performance that made a community feel seen;
- a creative gathering that became a lifeline;
- or one unforgettable moment when you thought: Oh. These are my people.
You might be the artist behind the experience, but you do not have to be. You might have participated in the work, helped make it happen, or simply been changed by experiencing it.
Your story can come from Colorado or anywhere else, online or in person, recent or long ago.
What We’re Looking For
Share an experience:
Send us a short MP4 video of under one minute or one or more photos/images, plus a brief story of the experience (up to 150 words).
Share a therapeutic offering:
Tell us about an arts-related healing program, service, or practice created for an established community.
Or share both!
And if you have more than one story or offering, you are welcome to submit the form more than once.
Please make sure you own the material you submit or have permission to share it. The form will also walk you through credits, permissions, and how you would like to be identified. Anonymous submissions are welcome.
The #ArtHealsCommunities campaign kicks off September 27, with stories and offerings shared across Athena Project’s social media channels and blog.
Campaign Logo by Dakota Harlow @theastrogoat
Up until the campaign start, you will find #ArtHeals stories from years past by following Athena Project on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Please like and share the ones that move. And if you feel inspired to support Athena Project in other ways, you can also volunteer or donate.
We can’t wait to hear your stories—and to meet the communities behind them!