Art imagines. Art restores. Art heals.
Art has a job.
Yes, it is a job. A job one should be honored to be touched with the talent/methods/story to bestow on others. Because the importance of art, particularly in times when the world seems to have forgotten how to empathize and connect, is priceless.
At its best and most divine, the job of art is to remind, honor, and humanize.
A necessity these days, right?
I believe in all of these things about art because its powers have been felt personally and been shared by others. It was challenging to think of some examples of this in a way that could be described in a short amount of time. I am not sure I will succeed when I do this but I will try.
Look at this painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Titled The Death of Michael Stewart, it was made in response to the 1983 death of a black graffiti artist at the hands of police. By the time Michael Stewart was delivered by the police officers who arrested him to a hospital, he was in a coma and later died from injuries. Some reports say it was a heart attack. Witnesses saw sustained battery from police officers.
This is a story we know too well.
This is a story Indigenous and Black families know too well.
Basquiat felt this work was a necessity because he felt he could have been in Michael’s shoes. “It could have been me,” he said. And the painting, he recounted, came out of wanting to honor a life that was taken too soon, a life that felt like his own.
Art memorializes this young person’s journey for others to see. Because of this work of art, I know this story and can pass it on to someone else who can pass it on to someone else and it can keep going and it can continue to not be forgotten because one talented person felt compelled to portray it in painting.
Art helps us find language when we have none.
To think of language’s potency, may we rouse up some Toni Morrison? She said, “Art invites us to know beauty, and to solicit it, to summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances…that language may be the measure of our lives.”
That language may be the measure of our lives. That can be repeated slowly to the self and never lose its fire.
How we talk, how we communicate, what we share.
We are beings who strive for connections and ways to communicate. Language, in any form–pictorial, acoustical, tactile, whatever–is a measure of how we make sense of our place in the world and how we respond to the place of others.
Language is a form of art and forms art.
Let’s look at more words.
Recording released on April 14, 2017, a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.
This is the description of Kendrick Lamar’s album DAMN. as written by the Pulitzer Prize jury, which awarded the album its Music prize in 2018.
Words describing this work of art have many layers to honor a genre and a people overlooked from history and systems and spaces in most cultures.
Music as art can bridge boundaries that even language cannot fathom.
For someone to rap “I’ve got loyalty, got royalty inside my DNA…got war and peace…” is an anthem for the complexities of humanness and the need for all aspects of the journey “power, poison, pain, joy” to be shared and listened to.
Listened to.
Words that arrange themselves in just the right way as relevant stories with a social consciousness — reminiscent of someone who sang of emancipation from mental slavery or someone else who was hollering from the unfair living conditions in urban settings.
Language that can be understood by all but made for a few.
When we listen to each other, life moves forward.
Because we stand up and remember someone.
Because we describe the way we connect with each other.
Because we tell it like it is in a way that resonates.
Art spends time getting to know us and creates spaces for us to know ourselves.
It imagines, restores, and heals.
