Building Audience, Visibility, and Organizational Capacity Through Music for Healing
Project Overview
Music for Healing is a free six-week exhibition of visual, sound, and performance art by interdisciplinary artist Angelica Olstad at ArteSana Gallery at Paper City Clothing Company. Arts Equity Group curated and produced Music for Healing at ArteSana Gallery, and executed the full communications, partnership strategy, and marketing strategy, including all community and press outreach, and designed and planned all public programming and events. Our work turned a single exhibition into a summer-long public healing resource for Holyoke, accompanied by four free public programs.
The exhibition earned regional coverage from New England Public Media. In addition, the artist and exhibition curator were interviewed on WHMP’s Art Beat. This media engagement also built lasting communications infrastructure for a young gallery in its first full exhibition season, by not only introducing its work to regional audiences, but also putting the space on the radar of arts and culture media.
Partners
Contributors
Danielle Amodeo, Shane Xie, JT Martin
Partner Background
Paper City Clothing Company is a Holyoke-based social enterprise founded in 2016 by Carlos Peña and Katy Peña Moonan. What began as a custom screen-printing shop on Dwight Street has grown into a platform for creative and economic opportunity for Holyoke youth. They offer free design, screen-printing, entrepreneurship workshops, and paid part-time work for local high school students through ArteSana Youth Studio.
In 2020, Paper City joined forces with ArteSana, a beloved Holyoke nonprofit and fellow social enterprise Moonan had led since 2014. That partnership gave a name to the company’s community arts work and set the vision for a permanent home considered a space for culture “for us, by us” in downtown Holyoke.
In May 2025, after three years and roughly $700,000 in public and private renovation funding, Paper City reopened at 144 High Street. The building, located on the National Register of Historic Places, had been abandoned for over a decade and slated for demolition after its roof collapsed. The restored building now holds a screen-printing production shop, a retail storefront, three residential units, and a 3,000-square-foot multi-level event and gallery space. The gallery’s mission is to create visibility and economic opportunity for emerging artists, prioritizing those historically underrepresented in the art world, while creating accessible and welcoming arts experiences for the Holyoke community.
About the Artist
Angelica Olstad is an interdisciplinary artist, classically trained pianist, yoga and meditation teacher, and community organizer whose work sits at the intersection of music, neuroscience, and collective care. Olstad has collaborated with neuroscientists and clinicians to understand how sound and movement travel through the nervous system, and how music can move a body from sensory overload toward regulation and calm. Her practice draws on chi gong, tai chi, and yoga alongside her formal conservatory training.
What They Were Looking For
Paper City Clothing Company came to Arts Equity Group with a clear commitment to support BIPOC artists by giving them gallery space to create free public programming and exhibitions. However, they have only a small team with an overflowing workload, which includes running a working screen-printing business, a youth volunteer program, and a newly opened 3,000-square-foot gallery at the same time with no dedicated press, programming, or audience development capacity.
The partnership set out to:
• Help the gallery spread its presence within the Holyoke community and greater region of Western Massachusetts.
• Establish the gallery as a destination for local and regional community members. In its first full season, with regional press and cultural institutions recognizing it as a free and welcoming venue.
• Give BIPOC artists a meaningful platform to show their work and connect with audiences.
• Build tailored outreach to audience, press, partners, and programming support behind the work.
Our Offerings
Arts Equity Group provided end-to-end curatorial, programming, communications and community engagement strategy across the full arc of the exhibition. From pre-launch positioning through program execution, our work spanned multiple areas:
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AEG developed the core messaging for all public-facing marketing materials including press releases, calendar listings, social captions, outreach emails, talking points, gallery guides, and more.
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AEG built and tiered a full regional press list, prioritized by geographic proximity and editorial fit rather than circulation size. Including prior coverage history and the specific angle most likely to land. We drafted the press release, assembled the media kit (poster, social files, images, artist background), crafted and placed calendar listings across regional culture calendars.
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AEG built a targeted community outreach list of 80+ individuals across the region. The list was deliberately weighted toward organizations whose communities are living the conditions the exhibition addresses.
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Item description AEG wrote the exhibition’s interpretive materials and all of its public-facing content, including wall text, gallery guides, and other interactive elements that let visitors contribute to the show rather than just view it. The same material was then adapted across digital and social channels so the voice stayed consistent everywhere someone who encountered the work.
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Everything AEG produced was built to be reusable. The tiered press list, the community outreach network, the message architecture, and the partner outreach process are all systems ArteSana Gallery now owns and can run against its next exhibition without external consulting support.
Noteworthy Press
Impact
Regional media visibility for a first-season gallery
The exhibition landed in the region’s core cultural media ahead of opening night. New England Public Media, the region’s leading public media outlet, featured Music for Healing in its Culture to Do roundup on July 15, two days before the doors opened, hitting the pre-launch window that helped Paper City Clothing gain recognition as a community gallery space.
WHMP’s Art Beat then hosted Danielle Amodeo and Angelica Olstad together for a full interview with Donnabelle Casis. This is a longer-form segment that lets the work be explained and in which puts Arts Equity Group and the artist in conversation on air. The exhibition also appeared across ArtsHub of Western Mass, Northampton.live, and the partner’s own editorial channels.
For a gallery in its first full exhibition season, coverage at this level establishes ArteSana in the regional press record as a venue worth covering. That is a durable asset, and it now attaches to every show that follows.
The talk-back wall
The exhibition’s interactive wall invited every visitor to add their own reflections and their own techniques for healing. It made the audience a co-author of the show, and it left behind an unmediated record of what the work meant to the people who came.
Capacity-building for the partner
ArteSana Gallery ended this engagement with a tiered regional press list with documented rationale for every contact, a community outreach network of 80+ people across the region, and an established local programming framework.
