Art Book Club: Your Brain on Art- How The Arts Transform Us hosted by Tara Tieso

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VIRTUAL EVENT

Psst…. we’ve started an art book club at Wet Paint.

Wish you read more about art? Interested in talking about Creativity? Artists? Art movements? The artistic process? Art concepts?

Read the selection and come discuss. Haven’t read the book? Come anyway and discover!

Facilitated by your most excellent host, Tara Tieso; teaching artist and active member of the Twin Cities arts community

This month’s selection: Your Brain on Art – How The Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A life-altering journey through the science of neuro-aesthetics, which offers proof for how our brains and bodies transform when we participate in the arts—and how this knowledge can improve our health, enable us to flourish, and build stronger communities.

Many of us think of the arts as entertainment—a luxury of some kind. In Your Brain on Art, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross show how activities from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture, and more are essential to our lives.

We’re on the verge of a cultural shift in which the arts can deliver potent, accessible, and proven solutions for the well-being of everyone. Magsamen and Ross offer compelling research that shows how engaging in an art project for as little as forty-five minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol, no matter your skill level, and just one art experience per month can extend your life by ten years. They expand our understanding of how playing music builds cognitive skills and enhances learning; the vibrations of a tuning fork create sound waves to counteract stress; virtual reality can provide cutting-edge therapeutic benefit; and interactive exhibits dissolve the boundaries between art and viewers, engaging all of our senses and strengthening memory. Doctors have even been prescribing museum visits to address loneliness, dementia, and many other physical and mental health concerns.

Your Brain on Art is a portal into this new understanding about how the arts and aesthetics can help us transform traditional medicine, build healthier communities, and mend an aching planet.

Featuring conversations with artists such as David Byrne, Renée Fleming, and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, Your Brain On Art is an authoritative guide to neuro-aesthetics. The book weaves a tapestry of breakthrough research, insights from multidisciplinary pioneers, and compelling stories from people who are using the arts to enhance their lives.

About the artist:

Tara L Tieso is an abstract painter who lives and paints in the historic arts Lowertown neighborhood of Saint Paul, on the mighty Mississippi. She paints with encaustic, an ancient beeswax and resin medium fused to its substrate with a torch. Tara also works in pen and ink, and loves all water-soluble media.

As a teaching artist, she leads classes for those of all creative abilities; facilitates Wet Paint’s Book Club; Eagan Artist Connect; and Creative Circles from her lowertown loft studio. 

A certified coach – Tara loves working working with creatives of all types. She is Past President of nationally celebrated WARM, Women’s Art Resources Minnesota – where she worked to steward a rich 40-year feminist legacy of brilliant women artists. She currently serves on the Boards of the Lowertown Lofts Artists Cooperative, and the Show Non-Profit, bringing artists of all abilities together in creative community.  

A grateful recipient of the McKnight Foundation-funded Metropolitan Regional Arts Council’s Next Step Grant, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant; she is one of 30 ArtSage Minnesota Artists, and a winner of North Hennepin Community College Award of Excellence in Memory of Lance Kiland from the Minnesota State Fair Foundation. Her work hangs in private collections in the Twin Cities, greater Minnesota, and Philadelphia.