Your Brain On Art

How can you use art, design, and daily sensory choices to change your brain, body, and relationships? In Your Brain on Art, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross argue that aesthetics are not luxuries; they are biologically active inputs that shape attention, emotion, learning, health, and belonging. The core claim is simple and radical: when you cultivate an aesthetic mindset—notice, play, create—you generate salient experiences that drive neuroplastic change and produce measurable benefits across your life.

The authors contend that arts experiences are multisensory “micro-interventions” that your nervous system recognizes as meaningful. Because your senses connect directly to memory and emotion centers, small aesthetic acts—humming, coloring, smelling a comforting scent, stepping into nature—become levers for mood, focus, and resilience. This is neuroaesthetics in practice, not theory.

What the aesthetic mindset looks like

You train your brain to scan for salience and savor it. You pause at a shadow on a wall, turn a tune into a ritual, or doodle for twenty minutes when stressed. Magsamen and Ross offer a practical gauge—the Aesthetic Mindset Index (adapted from Ed Vessel’s AReA)—so you can track how often you attend arts events, feel aesthetic chills, or make art yourself. Think of it like a step counter for your senses.

The book’s live installation, A Space for Being (with Suchi Reddy and Google’s hardware team), dramatizes the point. Visitors wore physiological sensors (heart rate, respiration, temperature) while exploring three designed rooms. Many preferred sleek, high-design spaces but biologically relaxed most in the colorful, book-filled middle room. Your body, not your opinion, tells the truth about what restores you. The aesthetic mindset closes that gap between preference and physiology.

The science you need to act

The authors weave five scientific threads into a practical playbook. First, the senses: smell, sound, color, touch, and taste are high-bandwidth signals that map into the brain’s emotion and memory hubs, which is why a song or scent can transform your state in seconds. Second, salience and plasticity: emotionally charged novelty acts like neural fertilizer, strengthening or pruning circuits with dopamine and norepinephrine. Third, enriched environments: from Marian Diamond’s rat studies to trauma-informed architecture, richer sensory contexts foster brain health. Fourth, arts and health: creative practices reduce cortisol, support trauma recovery, and complement clinical care (from VR analgesia to Dance for Parkinson’s and 40 Hz stimulation research in Alzheimer’s). Fifth, learning and transfer: arts build executive function, deepen attention and memory, and accelerate skill transfer through guided play and making.

Key Idea

Aesthetics are medicine for mood, mind, and community when you use them intentionally—small daily doses compound into lasting neural change.

What you’ll learn next

You’ll start with your senses and see why smell sparks memory, rhythm regulates physiology, and color shifts arousal. You’ll then learn how salience sculpts the brain and how to design spaces—homes, schools, clinics—that calm the body and speed recovery (Maggie’s Centres, Denver’s Arroyo Village, Little Island). You’ll explore arts for stress and trauma (Ashes2Art; mask-making at NICoE), and arts as clinical tools (SnowWorld VR for pain; Mark Morris’s Dance for PD; Connie Tomaino’s music and dementia; Li-Huei Tsai’s 40 Hz studies).

From there, the book reframes learning: Ellen Galinsky’s executive-function triad (working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control) gets built on stage, in ensembles, and with guided play (Golinkoff and Hirsh-Pasek’s Playful Learning Landscapes). “Make to know” (Lorne Buchman) explains why hands do what lectures can’t. You’ll see how arts-informed tech supports neurodiversity—smart glasses for autism (Sahin, Voss) and EndeavorRx for ADHD (Gazzaley)—and how awe, wonder, and ritual forge flourishing and belonging, from the Salk Institute’s courtyard to Cirque du Soleil’s synchronized brainwaves.

Why it matters to you

If you want practical tools for better mood, focus, learning, connection, or recovery, this book translates lab insights into daily habits. Arts-based interventions don’t just decorate life; they reorganize it. Whether you build a calming playlist at 60 bpm, redesign a break room with plants and curves (Tye Farrow’s “super vitamins”), or adopt a classroom Calm Corner (HEART), you are engineering salience that your biology rewards. The takeaway is empowering: you already possess—through your senses—the inputs to tune your nervous system. With an aesthetic mindset, you turn those inputs into a reliable practice for health, growth, and meaning. (Note: Unlike one-pathway medications, arts interventions activate many mechanisms at once—a point Daisy Fancourt emphasizes—which may explain their broad, durable effects.)

Magsamen and Ross invite you on a sensory tour because biology, not belief, makes the arts potent. Each sense is a fast track into brain networks for memory, emotion, and action. When you consciously design sensory inputs, you’re not decorating life—you’re dosing your nervous system.

Smell and visceral recall

Smell is ancient and direct. Odorants travel from your nose to the olfactory bulb and temporal lobe, which are fused with emotion and memory circuits. One whiff of a newborn or a parent’s cologne floods you with autobiographical detail. The authors highlight oxytocin’s role in bonding scents and note that freshly cut grass chemicals can engage the amygdala and hippocampus, reducing cortisol. Build your “scent anchors”: a calming oil for nausea or stress, a candle to mark a work ritual, a sachet that signals sleep.

Taste and identity

Taste routes into the gustatory cortex and viscera, weaving flavors with family and place. The book’s recipes—Susan’s grandmother’s chicken-and-dumplings, Ivy’s chocolate cake—illustrate how comfort foods encode safety and belonging. Use taste intentionally: a mindful sip or spice can evoke supportive states before a hard task.

Hearing: rhythm regulates

Sound converts air into physiology. Vibrations reach the auditory cortex and temporal lobe, where rhythm entrains brain waves. Music at ~60 bpm correlates with alpha-wave relaxation; slower patterns support sleep-like delta states. Ivy’s tuning-fork demonstration—just C and G—calmed a tense colleague in thirty seconds. Build playlists to steer arousal: 60 bpm to settle, mid-tempo for focused work, upbeat tracks to energize. (Note: This echoes Steven Porges’s polyvagal insights on how prosodic cues help regulate state.)

Vision: color and form

Vision engages occipital and lateral occipital areas for form and aesthetic appreciation. Color shapes physiology: reds raise galvanic skin response and perceived warmth; blues cool respiration and temperature. Expectation matters. In a 2014 study, people felt warm holding red objects because the mind predicted warmth—your perceptions modulate bodily sensations. Use visual levers: add blue tones for recovery zones, bring in natural light for alertness, and incorporate curvilinear forms to align with neurons tuned for smooth shapes (Ed Connor’s research).

Touch and embodied memory

Touch hits the somatosensory cortex within ~50 milliseconds and lays down durable memory. It releases oxytocin and grounds you in the present. The book cites a study where participants could identify a spoon they’d held weeks earlier by sight alone—proof of tactile encoding. Keep a grounding object—textured stone, fabric, or wood—within reach for quick state shifts. Craft, kneading clay, or even petting an animal turn touch into therapy.

Key Idea

Your senses are programmable inputs. Curate smell, sound, sight, taste, and touch to set your biological state for the task at hand.

Turn senses into a toolkit

Assemble a simple kit. Include a calming scent, a tactile object, a 60 bpm playlist, a blue light filter or plant for your workspace, and a comfort tea or spice. Use the kit as you would breathing exercises: on demand and with intention. Track your mood or heart-rate variability if you can; your body will tell you what works. (Comparison: like habit stacks in James Clear’s Atomic Habits, these sensory stacks piggyback on routines to make change stick.)

Bottom line: when you curate sensory inputs, you engineer the preconditions for focus, creativity, and calm. That’s the aesthetic mindset at work.

Neuroplasticity—your brain’s ability to rewire—is the book’s engine. The arts fuel that engine by creating salient experiences: emotionally charged, meaningful events that trigger neurochemical cascades and consolidate memory. You don’t need to be a professional artist to benefit; you need salience, repetition, and engagement.

How wiring and pruning work

Rick Huganir’s anatomy lesson frames it: neurons are trees with dendrites and axons forming quadrillions of synapses. “Cells that fire together, wire together” is true only when the signal is strong enough and emotionally relevant. Dopamine and norepinephrine bathe active synapses during salient moments, strengthening them. Pruning trims unused connections, saving energy and sharpening signal-to-noise. Art, by design, raises the signal.

The salience network as gatekeeper

Your anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate comprise a salience filter that flags what matters. Arts “hack” this filter by blending novelty, emotion, and reward. That’s why a performance gives chills or a painting locks your gaze: your brain tags it as important, opens the gates for plasticity, and writes it into memory.

Enriched environments amplify change

Marian Diamond’s classic rat studies showed cortical thickening in enriched habitats and atrophy in impoverished ones. The human analog is clear: richer sensory contexts—light, texture, nature, music, social play—stimulate growth. Programs like El Sistema accelerate children’s executive networks through orchestral rehearsal; Assal Habibi’s YOLA work shows earlier maturation and stronger interhemispheric connectivity.

Cases that make it practical

Ashes2Art helps firefighters like Aaron Miller re-engage attention and emotion through drawing. Repetition plus meaning calms the system and builds self-efficacy. Brandon Staglin’s experience with music therapy shows how motivational circuits in schizophrenia can be coaxed back online. Across cases, arts interventions operate like multi-target therapies (a point Daisy Fancourt underscores): they recruit sensory, motor, cognitive, and social systems at once, producing broader and more durable change than single-pathway drills.

Key Idea

Salience is the switch for plasticity; the arts flip it by making experiences emotionally meaningful, surprising, and rewarding.

Build a salience practice

Design a short, repeated ritual that blends novelty and emotion. For example: three days a week, sketch to music that reflects your current mood, then briefly title the sketch. Over weeks, your brain will associate the ritual with regulation and insight. Or, rehearse a new skill inside a compelling story (like a role-play or VR sim); salience boosts encoding and speeds transfer.

The takeaway is empowering: you don’t wait for motivation—you manufacture it by making experiences salient. When you do, your biology cooperates and your circuits change.

Your built environment can nourish or drain your nervous system. The book argues that spaces—homes, schools, clinics, parks—should be designed as enriched habitats that lower stress and foster recovery. Nature, light, curves, and cultural context aren’t luxuries; they are evidence-based design elements with physiological effects.

Nature as the master designer

Time in nature reliably drops cortisol and anxiety. Forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) and horizon gazing engage brainstem mechanisms that downshift arousal (Andrew Huberman’s explanations are referenced). Bringing nature indoors—plants, daylight, natural materials—restores balance. Curvilinear forms echo organisms we evolved to recognize as safe (Ed Connor’s neuronal tuning), while harsh angles often signal threat.

Case studies that heal

Maggie’s Centres (Heatherwick Studio) wrap cancer support in gardens, warm wood, and private nooks, reducing stress during vulnerable moments. Little Island transforms a pier into a tulip-shaped park that reconnects city dwellers to living landscapes. Arroyo Village in Denver bakes trauma-informed principles into public housing: more light, wide corridors, and soundproofing reduce hypervigilance for residents who’ve endured homelessness or abuse.

A Space for Being: listening to bodies

The Milan installation showed many people’s physiology choosing an “unsexy” room over a stylish one. That lesson scales: design must meet bodies, not trends. Tye Farrow’s “super vitamins”—natural light, materials, curves, and nature-like forms—have been linked to improvements in blood pressure, heart rate, and mental health. Aesthetics become vital signs of healthy places.

Design with culture and choice

One person’s soothing palette may be another’s trigger. The authors stress cultural attunement and choice architecture: offer multiple zones (quiet/active, bright/dim), avoid imposing a single taste in public or clinical settings, and co-design with users. Trauma-informed design centers safety, predictability, and control.

Key Idea

Treat spaces like therapeutic tools. When you shape light, texture, sound, and form, you’re practicing environmental medicine.

Try an enrichment audit

Spend twenty minutes in two rooms: one bland, one enriched with a plant, natural light, a curved object, and a calming scent. Track your breathing or just note calm, focus, and mood. Your physiology will point the way. Then, make small, compounding changes—add a plant per week, swap harsh lighting, soften acoustics, and create a choice-rich layout. (Comparison: This parallels hospital “healing environment” movements and biophilic design research.)

Design is not neutral; it is either healing or harmful. Choose healing.

Arts practices lower stress quickly and provide nonverbal pathways for trauma recovery. The book distinguishes everyday regulation tools—drawing, sound, color, poetry—from structured clinical programs for first responders, veterans, and children. Across contexts, the arts offer bottom-up routes to safety when words are insufficient.

Lower stress in minutes

Girija Kaimal’s research shows forty-five minutes of art-making reduces cortisol regardless of skill level. Prioritize process over product—permission to play matters. Tuning-fork sessions or vibroacoustic therapy (VAT) can dilate blood vessels via nitric oxide and ease pain and tension. Coloring mandalas calms anxiety by providing structured focus (from Jung’s clinic to modern studies). Poetry, with rhythm and compressed meaning, activates reward circuits and induces chills that mark a reflective, regulation-ready state.

Trauma: externalize, embody, integrate

Ashes2Art offers firefighters a way to draw out what they can’t yet say; Aaron Miller reports calmer moods and better relationships through regular practice. At the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE), Melissa Walker’s mask-making lets service members with TBI/PTSD externalize inner fractures—barbed wire, split faces—and regain narrative control. James Gordon’s three drawings (self; self + problem; self + problem solved) and James Pennebaker’s expressive writing demonstrate reduced PTSD risk and even fewer healthcare visits.

Bottom-up regulation

Resmaa Menakem’s somatic work—humming, rocking, rhythmic movement—metabolizes “trauma charge” through the body. HEART programs (Save the Children) build Calm Corners and group arts rituals that improve regulation and grief processing for kids. The evidence accumulates: arts are not decorative therapies; they are primary tools for safety and meaning.

Key Idea

Arts give the nervous system new routes home—through hands, breath, rhythm, image—when language can’t carry the load.

Build a personal regulation kit

Combine a 20-minute coloring ritual, a 60 bpm playlist, a tuning fork or hum practice, a scent associated with safety, and a short poem you love. Use the kit during spikes and track your subjective state. For teams, start meetings with a two-minute doodle or sound bath; for classrooms, install a Calm Corner with mandalas and texture objects. (Note: This pairs well with cognitive therapies; arts offer bottom-up scaffolds while talk provides top-down integration.)

Healing isn’t linear, but repeated, safe aesthetic rituals give the body and brain a map back to calm.

Beyond self-care, the arts function as medical tools across pain, movement disorders, dementia, and even cellular engineering. The book showcases clinical programs that weave aesthetics with technology and neuroscience to reduce symptoms and restore function.

VR for pain and attention

SnowWorld, an immersive VR world for burn patients, reduces reported pain by 35–50% during wound care. The mechanism is attentional competition: vivid visuals and sound hijack limited cognitive resources, dampening activity in pain-processing regions (anterior cingulate, insula, thalamus). Pain isn’t only nociception; it’s perception—change the context, change the pain.

Movement and rhythm in Parkinson’s

Mark Morris Dance Group’s Dance for PD engages basal ganglia, cerebellum, motor cortex, and rhythm networks to improve gait and mood. Rehearsal builds automaticity and attention to weight shifts; entrainment helps the body move even when dopamine is scarce. Benefits transfer beyond class into daily life.

Music unlocks dementia

Connie Tomaino’s work shows familiar songs activate medial prefrontal and hippocampal circuits, enabling autobiographical recall even as other systems fail. Music offers redundant cues—melody, rhythm, lyrics, affect—so patients can access preserved subcortical pathways. Families regain moments of recognition and connection.

Oscillations and Alzheimer’s

Li-Huei Tsai’s lab found that 40 Hz light and sound in mice reduced amyloid and tau and increased microglial cleanup. Combining sensory channels reached broader networks and improved cognition in animal models; carefully monitored human trials are underway. While early, this hints at aesthetic stimulation as neuromodulation.

Cymatics and cells

At Stanford, Utkan Demirci and Sean Wu used acoustic waves to pattern heart cells in gel—sound literally moved cells into functional quilts. It’s art meeting tissue engineering, showing that aesthetic forces can organize biology at the microscale.

Key Idea

Clinicians can prescribe aesthetics—VR, music, movement, light—as adjunctive therapies that modulate attention, oscillations, and immune processes.

Integration and ethics

Clinicians like David Putrino (neurorehab) and BJ Miller (palliative “aesthetics of care”) show how to weave art with medicine to restore function and meaning. Screen for sensory sensitivities, personalize inputs, and measure outcomes. Aesthetics augment—not replace—medications and therapy. (Comparison: Like multimodal anesthesia, combining sensory modalities can lower dose requirements for any single intervention.)

The future clinic is sensorial. Done well, it’s also dignifying.

The arts double as cognitive gyms. They build executive function, deepen attention and memory, and produce the gold standard of learning—transfer. From orchestra pits to VR labs, the book shows how aesthetic engagement recruits the brain systems that matter for lifelong learning.

Executive function on stage

Ellen Galinsky’s triad—working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control—gets daily reps in arts practice. Actors juggle lines, blocking, and emotion (working memory); shift perspectives and improvise (flexibility); and wait for cues (inhibition). Ensemble music and collaborative art projects demand planning, attentional control, and social regulation. Studies comparing arts-integrated vs. standard curricula show gains in collaboration, conflict management, inclusion, vocabulary, and confidence—executive muscles in action.

Attention-memory trifecta

You can’t remember what you didn’t attend to. Dan Levitin used music and humor to hook attention and encode concepts; surprise elevates dopamine, priming the hippocampus for storage. ASU’s Alien Zoo VR gave students an 18% retention boost in a single day, showing how immersion and interactivity multiply encoding opportunities.

Play drives transfer

Roberta Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek distinguish free play from guided play—child agency plus subtle scaffolds. Playful Learning Landscapes turn bus stops and sidewalks into math-and-language gyms; “jumping feet” stones prompt caregiver-child talk about patterns and numbers. Transfer happens because play embeds principles in emotionally salient, social contexts with multiple retrieval cues.

Make to know

Lorne Buchman’s phrase captures why hands-on making yields deeper understanding. Building a kaleidoscope or a simple circuit recruits sensorimotor systems and externalizes thought, making mental models visible and testable. Curiosity Kits and the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio show how tactile iteration rewires learning pathways and reframes mistakes as data.

Key Idea

Arts are not add-ons; they are infrastructure for attention, memory, and executive control—producing academic and life-course gains.

Practical moves for educators

Integrate an ensemble routine, one immersive simulation per unit, and a guided-play prompt in hallways or waiting areas. Use maker assessments (models, performances) alongside tests. For evidence, look to YOLA’s fMRI work (Assal Habibi) showing strengthened decision networks and connectivity, and to cohort studies (Daisy Fancourt) linking arts engagement with cognitive reserve later in life. (Note: Compared to drill apps, arts recruit reward, social, and motor circuits, likely explaining broader transfer.)

Learn like an artist; your brain will thank you like a scientist.

Neurodiversity is the rule, not the exception. The book shows how arts-informed technology can scaffold attention and social perception for diverse brains when it’s adaptive, engaging, and validated. Aesthetics—visual cues, sound, narrative—aren’t garnish; they’re the engagement fuel that makes training stick.

Smart glasses for autism

Ned Sahin’s Brain Power and Stanford’s Superpower Glass (Catalin Voss) adapted Google Glass to overlay emojis, color cues, and prompts that help children with ASD interpret emotions in real time. In a home-use trial with seventy-one children (JAMA Pediatrics, 2019), the glasses group made greater gains on the Vineland socialization scale than standard care. This is artful interface design meeting clinical measurement—visual aesthetics clarifying social signals.

Closed-loop gaming for ADHD

Adam Gazzaley’s NeuroRacer used real-time difficulty adjustments to train interference resolution and task switching. The approach became Akili’s EndeavorRx, the first FDA-cleared digital therapeutic for pediatric ADHD. Sessions of ~30 minutes/day yielded sustained attention improvements that transferred beyond the game. Narrative, music, and reward kept kids engaged; closed-loop feedback personalized the challenge curve.

Design principles

Three rules emerge: closed-loop adaptation (sense and adjust in real time), aesthetics for engagement (art, sound, character), and personalization (match the learner’s profile and evolve with progress). Add rigorous trials, privacy safeguards, and human coaching to ensure ethical, effective use.

Key Idea

When tech is artful and adaptive, it can level the playing field—augmenting attention and social skills without dull, drill-like fatigue.

Applying it in practice

If you support neurodivergent learners, trial smart-glass coaching or FDA-cleared digital therapeutics alongside occupational therapy or CBT. Use stylized visual cues or rhythmic prompts in classrooms. Preserve agency: let users set goals and choose aesthetics that feel safe. (Comparison: Think of these tools like prescription lenses for attention—tailored, adjustable, and used in conjunction with human support.)

The path forward blends humane design with clinical rigor so that technology amplifies, rather than replaces, relationships.

Flourishing is more than happiness. Drawing on Tyler VanderWeele’s five domains (happiness, health, meaning, virtue, relationships), the book argues that aesthetic states—curiosity, surprise, and especially awe—align neural systems for thriving. Awe shrinks the ego, synchronizes brains, and expands prosocial behavior.

Curiosity as medical training

Psychiatrist Meg Chisolm uses Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) with medical trainees, guiding them to observe art by Njideka Akunyili Crosby and ground claims in visual evidence. The silence and inquiry sharpen attention and empathy—skills essential for compassionate care. VTS is an aesthetic practice that rewires clinical perception.

Architecture that induces awe

Jonas Salk, inspired by the Basilica of Saint Francis, partnered with Louis Kahn to design the Salk Institute’s courtyard—ocean horizon, stone, and sky tuned to evoke awe. Dacher Keltner’s work shows awe down-regulates the default mode network, increases a “small self,” and boosts prosociality. Standing in that courtyard, people report time-slowing transcendence that reframes purpose.

Measuring wonder

Beau Lotto’s Cirque du Soleil study recorded synchronized audience brain activity and predicted awe with ~76% accuracy. After performances, people tolerated uncertainty better and took healthier risks—markers of creative openness. Barbara Groth’s Nomadic School of Wonder crafts multi-sensory, site-specific journeys; participants describe lasting shifts after immersion in remote landscapes punctuated by artful prompts.

Key Idea

Awe is a lever for flourishing—resetting perspective, synchronizing social minds, and unlocking curiosity-driven growth.

Practicing awe and novelty

Schedule micro-awe: seek horizons, visit a moving performance, or walk under cathedral trees. Add novelty to unstick habituation—alternate commute routes, visit Meow Wolf or Spiral Jetty, or build an “awe list” for your city. (Note: Mindfulness often turns attention inward; awe shifts it outward toward vastness—these practices complement each other.)

Designing for wonder isn’t indulgent; it’s a strategy for meaning and resilience.

Humans evolved around fires—singing, dancing, telling stories. The book argues, following E. O. Wilson’s reflections, that collective aesthetics are our original social technology. Today, when loneliness is a public-health crisis, shared creative rituals remain some of the fastest ways to rebuild trust and identity.

Indigenous templates

Hopi practices (Phillip and Judy Tuwaletstiwa) weave kachina carving, corn ceremonies, and storytelling into daily life, reinforcing shared values. Māori Taonga Puoro instruments (Jerome Kavanagh) carry healing and messaging functions. These aren’t “cultural extras”; they are social operating systems where art and life are inseparable.

Urban regeneration as culture work

In Chicago’s Englewood, Emmanuel Pratt’s Sweet Water transforms vacant lots into gardens, canning houses, and Think-Do spaces. Maria Rosario Jackson’s “cultural kitchens” metaphor captures the recipe: places to create, share food, and rehearse collective futures. Aesthetics shift narratives about place from blight to possibility.

The social brain in sync

Matthew Lieberman’s work shows the default network is tuned for social cognition. Storytelling couples brain activity between speaker and listener (Princeton research). Moving in synchrony—military marching, chorus singing, or David Byrne’s Social Distance Dance Club—increases trust and generosity through hormonal and neural alignment. Synchronized rhythm is an “extra dose of affinity.”

Prescribing community

Vivek Murthy has called loneliness a health threat; programs like Project UnLonely and Massachusetts’ CultureRx use social prescribing so clinicians can refer patients to arts activities—knitting circles, storytelling, community theater. Participants report reduced isolation and stronger belonging. The arts create low-stakes, high-meaning entry points to connection.

Key Idea

Shared aesthetic rituals synchronize bodies and stories, turning strangers into neighbors and neighbors into communities.

Start a ritual, build a hearth

Create recurring gatherings that mix food, music, and making: a weekly meal with a playlist and a short poem; a block mural day; a neighborhood drum circle. Keep it open, participatory, and culturally responsive. Over time, these micro-rituals rewire the social fabric—your community’s brain—toward trust and care. (Comparison: As in Blue Zones, rituals are protective factors for health; here, aesthetics supply the glue.)

Belonging isn’t built by argument; it’s rehearsed, together, through art.