What Arts-and-Health Practices Teach Us About Participation, Re-presentation, and Risk.

This article explores the implications of risk in arts-and-health collaborations that represent illness narratives for the purpose of engaging the public. Based on an artist's, bioengineer's, and health psychologist's reflections from pediatric and adult group workshop practice settings, this article canvasses 8 dimensions of risk that deserve ethical attention.

Colonial Virus": COVID-19, creative arts and public health communication in Ghana.

Since March 2020, Ghana's creative arts communities have tracked the complex facets of the COVID-19 pandemic through various art forms. This paper reports a study that analysed selected 'COVID art forms' through arts and health and critical health psychology frameworks. Art forms produced between March and July 2020, and available in the public sphere - traditional media, social media and public spaces - were collated. The data consisted of comedy, cartoons, songs, murals and textile designs. Three key functions emerged from analysis: health promotion (comedy, cartoons, songs); disease prevention (masks); and improving the aesthetics of the healthcare environment (murals). Textile designs performed broader socio-cultural functions of memorialising and political advocacy. Similar to earlier HIV/AIDS and Ebola arts interventions in other African countries, these Ghanaian COVID art forms translated public health information on COVID-19 in ways that connected emotionally, created social awareness and improved public understanding. However, some art forms had limitations: for example, songs that edutained using fear-based strategies or promoting conspiracy theories on the origins and treatment of COVID-19, and state-sponsored visual art that represented public health messaging decoupled from socio-economic barriers to health protection. These were likely to undermine the public health communication goals of behaviour modification. We outline concrete approaches to incorporate creative arts into COVID-19 public health interventions and post-pandemic health systems strengthening in Ghana. FUNDING: None declared.

Paintings From Spain's COVID-19 Pandemic.

Artist Francisca Lita Sáez considers experience of physicians during Spain's COVID-19 pandemic. Three acrylic and pastel paintings convey defenseless human beings' confrontations with the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is not yet controlled, leaving suffering and death in its wake. A physician-artist collaboration offers a visual representation of the clinical and ethical magnitude of the pandemic and humanity's fight for survival.

The Spanish 1918 Flu and the COVID-19 Disease: The Art of Remembering and Foreshadowing Pandemics.

Tragic events such as pandemics can be remembered as well as foreshadowed by works of art. Paintings by the artists Edvard Munch and John Singer Sargent (1918-19) tell us in real time what it was like to be stricken by the Spanish flu. Paintings by Edward Hopper (1940s and '50s) foretell the lockdown and social distancing of today's COVID-19 pandemic.

Announcing the winners of our COVID-19 Creative Communication Competition.

The FEBS Journal announces the winners and runners-up of its COVID-19 Creative Communication Competition in which entrants were asked to depict 'post-lockdown lab life'.

Breath Is Life.

This painting memorializes the lives of people who died in the COVID-19 pandemic and people who have died from police brutality.

Integrative illustration for coronavirus outreach.

Two illustrations integrate current knowledge about severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronaviruses and their life cycle. They have been widely used in education and outreach through free distribution as part of a coronavirus-related resource at Protein Data Bank (PDB)-101, the education portal of the RCSB PDB. Scientific sources for creation of the illustrations and examples of dissemination and response are presented.