ART IS A SPIRITUAL ACT AND A HUMAN RIGHT
Alta Mesa Center for the Arts, under the leadership of Mary Volmer, is an interfaith arts and spirituality hub, housed within and sponsored by Orinda Community Church.
Please join us each month for our 2nd SundaY READING SERIES
Coming up at Alta Mesa Center for the Arts…
Maker, Mentor, Muse & Alta Mesa Center for the Arts Presents
a reading and Q&A with Dr. Wendy Johnson, author of Kinship Medicine
in conversation with Jennie Durant
Sunday, March 15 - 4:00 PM
Zoom
RSVP HERE
In Kinship Medicine, Dr. Wendy Johnson makes the case that wellness is rooted in interdependence. It’s a perspective she’s come to through 30 years working as a family physician and public health expert, supporting patients with HIV, treating communities in environmentally harmed areas, and advocating for mothers suffering from addiction. Through all of her work, she’s seen how connection to the natural world and each other are essential to our health, and we can’t be fully well when the environments and systems we’re living with are sick and suffering.
The antidotes to many of the causal factors of poor health—loneliness, industrial diets, systemic inequality, fear of death, profit-based healthcare—are relational, both with each other and with the living earth. Through evidence from public health, sociology, anthropology, human ecology, and medicine, Dr. Wendy Johnson offers readers a clear vision of what a new society might look like, and provides concrete examples and methods for caring for our collective health together.
Dr. Wendy Johnson is a family physician, public health professor, activist, and writer who has spent her life advocating for a world where everyone can live long lives in equitable communities. Her career includes stints scaling up HIV treatment in Mozambique, overseeing an urban public health department, and, most recently, directing a community clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has a Master’s in public health from Johns Hopkins and holds faculty appointments at the University of Washington and the University of New Mexico. Dr. Johnson has been a vocal activist on many progressive issues both locally and globally and is a two-time TEDx speaker.
Jennie Durant is a writer and researcher focused on bees, agriculture, and the environment. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Grist, The Huffington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her forthcoming book, Bitter Honey, will be published by Island Press (an imprint of Princeton University Press) in May 2026.
Mission
We believe that art is a spiritual act and a human right. Contained within that sentence are our two primary goals: a) to provide a place for artists to engage in the spiritual aspects of their art and for spiritual seekers to use art to deepen and discover new avenues of spiritual experience; b) to provide a place where people from diverse traditions, artistic practices, and economic realities come together in community.
From experience we know that art can bridge the divisions, substantive and arbitrary, that divide us. We come together not only to practice and teach the arts, but to celebrate and learn from our differences and to foster lively and respectful interdisciplinary dialogues. We seek unity in diversity. We welcome professional artists, writers and musicians, experienced amateurs, hobbyists, mystics and seekers young and old. Wherever you are on your artistic and spiritual journey, whoever you are, we welcome you.