Creativity and Culture

Discover an annual festival that uses creativity to explore mental well-being, and that’s finding ways to use performance to make happier brains.

Now allowing in humans, this store has everything the monster in you needs (and a not-so-secret cause behind it all).

The many ways that creativity can make you feel better wherever you are, and whatever your creative practice.

A London studio designed for grown-ups to discover their own creativity, with all the wellbeing benefits of making.

If like many of us you’ve lost contact with basic DIY skills, London’s The Goodlife Centre gets those power tools back in your hands.

In a moment when time is stretching out, Anthony Gormley’s “Iron Men” captures the wonder of shifting lives.

We talked to the founder of the world’s first Poetry Pharmacy about why poetry still matters.

Tate Exchange is answering its own question: that art does have the potential to impact our lives.

Dartington, we found out, is one of those special places that are many different things to many different people, some of which we’d guessed at, and many of which we hadn’t. It’s like a polymath of a place.

At a time when we’re driven more and more into the informational world of our phones, Bath’s Magalleria stakes physical/ actual space for the recent resurgence of independent magazines.

“Beautiful Things to Hold in Your Hands”: a San Francisco store bringing year-round joy.

826 Valencia is keeping space for our kids’ imaginations in our cities, and crafting magical spaces for our communities and for ourselves as it does so.

The Museum of Ice Cream might seem like it’s about sugary confections, and equally as sweet images, but approach it as a place of connection and then it becomes something else entirely different.

What makes the beachy Codfish Cowboy unique is that it's filled with pieces made by local residents. There's a very low chance you'll be able to find the item on Amazon later.

Maria Popova, a similar collector of interesting (in ideas rather than things) encourages: “Be curious. Be constantly, consistently, indiscriminately curious.” We had that quote in mind talking to Lea and wandering through Lucky Penny Parlor.

City Lights Bookstore is a literary landmark and a magical meeting place for intellectual inquiry.

There are the obvious jokes one can make about the plethora of experiential pop-up museums that have emerged in our new Instagram-able world, but perhaps there is a kind of beauty that would not have been dreamed nor experienced had social media not been invented.

Shaping itself very much as a ‘citizen institution’ in diverse and ambitious ways, YBCA is more than an arts institution, it is a container for all our lives.

An emporium for the curious, for searchers and explorers of the page and white space. San Francisco’s Case for Making has been thoughtfully designed to ‘push our collective ideas further about what creativity can be’.

It’s when Susan Orlean writes of the multipurpose function of libraries now to be the spaces that can reflect our public imagination that we feel like signing up to be a librarian right now.

Designed to connect us with different ways of understanding what happiness is and why we might be looking for it in all the wrong places, Copenhagen’s Happiness Museum is what we all need right now.

Street Wisdom is prefacing a way of being that feels critical now. It’s untethering us from devices, it’s getting us back into our heads and bodies, it's making us sit with ideas again, and it’s offering us the space, time and tools to allow new perspectives in.

ARoS refers to itself as a ‘mental fitness center’ which we just love. We’re very much on board with that approach to our museums.

There are the obvious jokes one can make about the plethora of experiential pop-up museums that have emerged in our new Instagram-able world, but perhaps there is a kind of beauty that would not have been dreamed nor experienced had social media not been invented.

When faced with the possibility of a blank page and a typewriter, what would you say, and to whom would you write. An apology, a confession, a declaration of affection?

It’s a Friday morning. You have 30 minutes before work. You could be anywhere in the world. It’s time to get inspired. You are at a Creative Mornings Session.

We talked to the founder of the world’s first Poetry Pharmacy about why poetry still matters.

We talk to Ali DeJohn, founder of the Makerie retreat, about why self-care and creativity are inextricably linked.

We talk to the British journalist Toni Jones, Founder of Shelf Help about the bookclub that became a global movement and why its her mission to make self-help accessible, collaborative and cool.

At a moment when we’re all being pushed to do more and more online—more apps, more sharing, more webinars—neve & hawk founder, Kris Galmarini is making the case that actual brick-and-mortar spaces matter.

Some of us know our purpose right from the get-go; many of us don’t, we stumble on it. For Alisha Reyes, founder of Sonoma County’s Fiber Circle Studio, it took knitting a pair of socks at age 17 for her life to light up.

Learn how to bring a creative mindset to your well-being practices.

Learn how to fold more creative activities into your everyday life, so that you can feel happier.

Discover how expressive writing can boost mental health and creativity. Learn how this simple practice helps deepen awareness, process emotions, and unleash imagination. Explore key exercises for immediate well-being benefits.

On the publication of her new book First Art Kit, we caught up with Boo Paterson to talk about how therapy and paper crafting can come together, why using our hands can help our brains, and how sometimes peace can be found in a paper Gramophone sitting on our bedstand.

The many ways that creativity can make you feel better wherever you are, and whatever your creative practice.

But the beauty in this moment, if there is any to be found, is that we’re beginning to accept that mental health isn’t just something to be addressed within the stark walls of our therapist’s office. We’re beginning to look to more than the typical health care provider to carry us through. We’re beginning to see that, maybe, there is healing to be found elsewhere? Maybe there are solutions and connections and answers in our everyday lives? Maybe music is here to save us, after all.

It’s like a religious revival tent meeting, but for cynics. Instead of their Sunday best, they wear their vintage 1940s finest. Rather than speaking in tongues, they wax on and on about who played what character in whatever desperately underrated classic. And Communion comes in the form of a big dose of black and white on the Castro Theatre’s massive screen.

The great irony of Marfa is that it isn’t really trying to be anything other than what it is: a tiny, dusty Texas town. The city of Marfa website pitches it as “more than just a place. . . . It’s a state of mind,” but my mom and I agreed that that gives the wrong idea.