This month, the Crow Collection of Asian Art announced Jacqueline Buckingham Anderson as the director of their newly launched Wellness Institute, which will be composed of daily mini-meditations, classes like yoga and Tai Chi, and health lectures from notable leaders. I sat down with Anderson and Executive Director Amy Lewis Hofland to talk about the state of wellness in Dallas, and what they hope to bring through the institute.
What was the process to get the Wellness Institute to what it is today?
Amy Hofland: It’s really been an evolution. We’ve taught yoga in the galleries for seven or eight years, and we started hearing visitors say, “I love coming to the Crow. It’s such an oasis. I feel so relaxed here.” Wellness practices are found throughout Asian history and Asian art and we also have a firm belief that even looking at art is wellness. So if we can be the place where people slow down and they pause, then we can teach them to meditate or to try something new like Tai Chi. It’s been a dream for a long time to have a curator of wellness, someone really thinking about the resources locally and intentionally that can help us teach people to take care of themselves.
So are you looking at this as an art form? You use the word curator, which is so interesting to me. You’re a curator of wellness?
Jacqueline Buckingham Anderson: Laughing Sure, why not?
AH: You curate wellness…Maybe she’s the first.
Have you seen a departure from single-minded fitness or single-minded dieting to greater well-rounded living?
AH: I would definitely say it’s a new trend, but it’s an essential one. It’s almost as if people are so desperate for relief from stress they have to come to something. And they’re seeking alternatives to a stressed out life. You can really see it with yoga. Twenty years ago, there were yoga classes, but now it’s sort of everyone’s practice in a way and that’s a good thing. I would definitely say that it’s a trend, but it’s not a “flash in the pan” by any means because people don’t leave wellness once they get there.
JBA: I agree. I also think the state of our health is the impetus for wellness as well. Now doctors and other practitioners are prescribing yoga, prescribing meditation for anxiety and stress reduction. I think wellness is a necessity.
Is the institute uniquely developed for the stressors of our lives here in Dallas?
JBA: I feel like we need it everywhere, I do, but what’s unique about our opportunity here is that we are in the art district. We have such a wonderful and synergistic downtown community. We really have the ability to access and make accessible these stress-reducing practices like meditation. Sitting still for fifteen or thirty minutes in the morning can completely affect how the rest of your day goes and affect your success and life and your satisfaction with how your day goes. I feel like we have a unique opportunity to tap into wellness in a place that is not yet overrun with it necessarily.
But Jacqueline, what about yoga? You have been practicing and teaching for years, right?
JBA: I started doing yoga when I moved to New York, which was in 1998, and it really changed…everything about my life. I came to it through a gym, through a gym on 86th street, Equinox.
Will you be teaching any classes?
JBA: Yeah! I’ll be teaching here in May. This year is the Year of Practice. Amy dubbed it that and we’ll have twelve themes within the year. This month is nutrition and May is movement, so I’ll be teaching then, specifically around mindful movement, specifically with injury.
How does nutrition play into this idea of well-rounded living?
JBA: It’s something that you can’t escape. We might not practice Chi Gong three times a day, but we generally eat three times a day and we’re constantly faced with choices. And I do feel like wellness is a series of choices. I’ll be incorporating a recipe of the month, dish of the month, different cookbooks that are offered at the store, different studies that may be around nutrition because, we must eat to live. We don’t have to practice Chi Gong, but we must eat to live. So we have to find different approaches to eating healthier, which are actually simple but because of where we are as a culture today, have become more difficult.
Can you share any of what you’re planning?
AH: I can’t wait for our first exhibition of wellness, you know, and really looking at works of art as places to center and learn other aspects of wellness—breathing and balance and compassionate living.
