Why Art

In these days when here in the US we are revisiting so much around what we value as a society, I’ve been thinking about why we make art, how it shapes us. I just came back from Santa Fe, New Mexico where so much seems to be about making. There is a hill dedicated to museums, a street full of galleries, and a style of architecture that defines the entire area, a style rooted in a long history of indigenous dwellings. Santa Fe has existed for over four hundred years post-colonization and was already the site of a Tanoan Indian village long before then. A long time to cultivate beauty and ways of being.

And right now, with funding for the arts imperiled, and the NEA withdrawing grants to artists around the country––dance troupes, art enrichment for school children, poetry projects––all the kinds of things these grants are made to support, we’re in a moment of remembering why art matters.

To me, the act of making art is one of the ways in which human beings create reciprocity. We are given the worlds as it is, with all its challenges and moments of grace, all its sorrows and beauty, and, in return, we can offer our making. We can take hours to interpret an arrangement of leaves and flowers and offer that to others. We can slow time in a poem, make a mirror of our decades of lived experience. We can sing, and, like a woman I once met, attract a pod of whales to come and listen. The world is filled with wonders, and the soul of art allows us to make an offering to wonder. When I think about the process of writing a poem, I often think of this quote by Emily Brontë, from Wuthering Heights:

“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after and changed my ideas: they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”

Indeed. The mind alters when making. We are asked to see the world anew, to observe it as it is, but also to wonder, and that wondering can lead us into possibility. And, as Albert Einstein said:

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day.”

I hope we will keep reminding each other to attend to mystery, to beauty. I hope we will keep reminding ourselves, and that we will build a world that remembers art is an opportunity to be more of ourselves and to give beauty to a world of beauty, a world that gives us so much every day.

Diorama, Sante Fe Museum of Internation Folk Art