How The Arts Enable Us to Reframe
Situations make up daily life. The arts are our translator.
Through the arts, we are enabled to navigate, reframe, and revise our lives. Art provides platforms for expression and interpretation by providing spaces for dialogue and discussion. This allows individuals to engage with diverse perspectives and share their own experiences. Artistic works actively provoke thought and contemplation, offering us unique perspectives and challenging us to question our assumptions and biases about different situations. Both transformative and bonding, art meets people where they are and is fluid enough to include or appeal to different parts of someone whether it's their life, their characteristics, or a particular situation that resonates. To find solace in shared experiences and gain clarity on complex issues, we turn to the art of storytelling.
Trust and community is built through art; through intaking one person's experience or interpretation, being able to recognize how those themes appear in your life, and having your thoughts mirrored in a way that allows you to reframe and revise your perspective. Experiencing art is experiencing understanding; integrating many parts to create a whole. The arts contain the power to take you outside of yourself and to expose qualities– values, drives, compassion– within you that you see exposed in someone else. Art teaches us how to consider each other.
Viewing the arts as a way to reframe is acknowledging reinterpretations of reality. Artists often challenge conventional or dominant narratives and offer alternative viewpoints on social, political, and personal issues, encouraging audiences to expand their thinking and reconsider their viewpoints. Artists and artistic works can even change how we think about experiencing art. Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD., National Endowment of the Arts Chair, states “A framework I have used for a few years now, as I have tried to boil down the myriad ways that the arts intersect with a number of different fields, including health, is that the arts are crucial to helping us reframe—see things differently and become available to paradigm shift, retool—expand or change the ways in which we have gone about addressing challenges, and actually do the work of repair—the work of mending, healing, and growing anew.”
Mending through art is not a new concept, art has always had the power to inspire action and social change by raising awareness of pressing issues, mobilizing communities, and advocating for justice. It often serves as a therapeutic tool, guiding individuals to envision new possibilities for themselves and their communities. Paintings, sculptures, and installations can challenge societal norms and offer new ways of seeing the world; what is the Statue of Liberty without her symbolism of freedom and friendship? Live performances allow audiences to engage with complex narratives in real-time, fostering empathy and reflection. Have you ever watched a play or a dance and been absorbed by the characters’ journeys and struggles? Could you feel the loss, the love, or the transformation? Novels, poems, and essays often provide nuanced portrayals of human experiences, allowing readers to empathize with characters from diverse backgrounds. Whether its creation or observation, no part of art is ever done completely alone. Many artistic projects revolve around and involve collaboration and community engagement, fostering connections between artists, audiences, and advocates.
The arts thrive on experimentation and innovation, pushing boundaries and challenging conventions to create new possibilities for expression and understanding. Arts emphasize what guides a situation. We understand through stories and they enable us to look back at history through the people, ideals, and spirit that built that history, along with the spirit that continues its legacy. This is why we find ourselves drawn together to share art. This is why we value, advocate, and collaborate for our community art venues. Art goes hand in hand with the actions of appreciation and contribution, art teaches us a picture is made of multiple parts, and you often find you enjoy a movie because of the different ways scenes contribute to and impact the plot, not despite them.
