As Thomas Jefferson reminded us, travel makes us wiser…but less happy.

And so it is when you confront a piece of art that makes you stop in your tracks, swim in it, and know what it’s saying in terms of what you know you know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Such was the case yesterday during a walking meeting through the Frist Art Museum in Nashville when I passed by this quilt, a multimedia work titled “Still Life in Need” by Lee Colvin, a local artist.

This work was part of a juried exhibition at FAM, “Enough to Go Around,” serving as a companion show to two other exhibits in the museum: Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, and Tennessee Harvest, 1870s-1920s.

These two shows illustrate agriculture and food’s role in peoples’ security and well-being, noting that the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 30 to 40% of the food supply in America is wasted each year while millions of people experience food insecurity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The artist writes in the notes accompanying the work that, “The art piece mirrors my struggles to feed my family on a limited budget. Much like on my trips to the grocery store, I was limited by my budget, location, and imagination. I had to get creative and be content with what `I could create from what I found available.”

For this juried portfolio, FAM partnered with several regional organizations working on food access, food justice, and gardening and farming programs with local residents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This discussion of food deserts and food swamps is part of the display in the midst of the 22 works featured in the Enough to Go Around mini-show. There is an important distinction between a desert vis-a-vis a swamp when it comes to food and health: a food desert is an area with a high poverty rate where at least one-third of residents live over one mile from the closest grocery store in an urban area or over ten miles from a grocer in a rural area.

A food swamp is an area with higher density of unhealthy food offerings — think fast food and convenience stores (aka C-Stores or bodegas, for example). Here there are foods to be purchased, but are too often over-processed and not fresh or nutritious.

Healthy food availability and access are central to peoples’ health and wellbeing as individuals, for families, and in communities. Nutritious food is a key pillar among the many traditional social determinants of health.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  Back to the artwork which caused my “wiser but sadder” realization.

Here’s a close-up of the lower right corner of Colvin’s work. What do we see?

Why, it’s an electric socket, cord and plug.

What is this image doing in a work called “Still Life in Need?”

In my interpretation of this, through my lens I’ll use when addressing a keynote audience today in Nashville, I’m discussing some new-fangled drivers of health — relevant to this image, connectivity and WiFi which emerged as a crucial determinant of health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Without connectivity, we couldn’t work from home, go to school from home, attend faith services from home, partake in telehealth and virtual care visits for physical or mental health conditions, or even socialize from home with loved ones via videoconference technology. Even the older people in our family, long divided digitally, if they had connectivity to a smartphone or tablet, met us via Zoom and Teams and FaceTime and WhatsApp in the depth of the pandemic.

But connectivity costs, and so does electricity….and so, as Colvin reminds us in this work, our basic needs are many, and if we have risks for one social determinant, we probably are at risk of missing out on other key contributors to health — whether food security or transportation, clean air and water, safe spaces to play outdoors, secure employment, and education, among them.

Thank you to the Frist Museum of Art for supporting arts that make a difference for us — inspiring knowledge, empathy, and calls-to-action.