What If Creativity Arrived Before the Crisis?

Arts activism, sometimes called artivism, uses creativity to advance social change.

Res Creativa asks a different question:

How can creativity change our ability to live together?

This is an inquiry into what becomes possible when we place creativity before crisis, rather than summoning it only after events have been set in motion.

As moving as the collective response at the Kennedy Center on September 18 was, the gathering was necessarily reactive. Something had already happened. A threat already existed. People assembled in response.

We have seen creative responses to injustice, oppression, and political upheaval throughout modern history.

During the Civil Rights Movement, freedom songs helped give collective voice to the struggle. Murals transformed sections of the former Berlin Wall into an international canvas of political meaning. Theatre, jazz, poetry, and other cultural forms helped articulate resistance to apartheid in South Africa. Indigenous-led movements have used visual culture to make questions of sovereignty and environmental justice visible far beyond the places where those struggles originate.

In these and countless other instances of arts activism, the strongest claim is not that art causes social change. It is that creative practice can make movements legible, cohesive, and emotionally persuasive in ways policy arguments alone often cannot.

But creativity does not accomplish political change by itself.

Meaningful reform also requires organizing, law, economic pressure, institutional action, public participation, and political opportunity.

And protest has a structural limitation: by the time it becomes necessary, power may already have defined the problem, narrowed the options, and set events in motion.

Res Creativa is interested in the other end of that timeline.

Res Creativa does not ask artists to become activists, adopt a cause, or direct their work toward a predetermined political outcome.

It asks what society can learn from the ways creative people already practice: imagining alternatives, tolerating ambiguity, making meaning, collaborating across difference, revising what is not working, and giving form to what does not yet exist.

So rather than arts activism, I think about this as arts proactivism.

Most conversations about art and social change begin after something has gone wrong. An injustice has occurred. A right has been threatened. A decision has been made.

Creativity is then summoned to resist, reveal, persuade, console, organize, or protest.

And I confess there are moments when I wonder whether any amount of creative protest can penetrate some concentrations of power.

[Supply your own example here]

What happens if creative practitioners are present when the problem itself is being defined? Before the policy is written. Before the choices narrow. Before constituencies retreat to opposing corners. Before crisis makes imagination politically expensive.

This is not an argument for artists to govern. Nor is it an argument that creative thinking should replace law, expertise, economics, science, or democratic accountability.

It is an argument that those systems are incomplete without imagination.

This is the less-traveled path, but it is not entirely unfamiliar. We have glimpsed the possibility before:

• Artist-in-residence programs within government have explored what happens when artists work alongside public agencies rather than respond to their decisions afterward.

• Policy labs and design practices have brought people-centered, creative methods into the process of examining complex civic problems.

• Speculative design and design fiction have used imagined objects, scenarios, institutions, and futures to make abstract possibilities tangible enough to examine and debate.

• Civic imagination practices have brought people together through storytelling to imagine possibilities beyond existing political choices.

These practices differ considerably, and none provides a singular model for Res Creativa.

But they share an important proposition:

Creativity does not have to wait until the decision has been made.

Place creativity inside the smoke-filled room rather than only outside protesting it. Deploy creative practice as a diagnostic capacity at the bottleneck, not simply as an element of protest after the bottleneck fails. Interrupt the familiar pattern of we’ll deal with it when it becomes a crisis.

These proactive models intervene when problems are being framed, before options have narrowed, when imagination still has leverage over what gets defined as possible.

Arts proactivity is harder to see. Preventative work usually is.

There is no parade celebrating the conflict that was avoided. No monument to the possibility that was noticed before it disappeared.

But that invisibility may be precisely the point.

We have spent generations asking what artists can do when society reaches a crisis.

Res Creativa asks an earlier question:

What might happen if creative practice were present before crisis became inevitable?

Not as decoration. Not as outreach. Not as messaging. Not as protest alone.

As capacity.

Creative practice does not have to wait outside the room until something has gone wrong.

It could be a standing capacity of governance.

A version of this post was also published on Substack, Sep. 20, 2026.

Banner image: The mural My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love (often called The Fraternal Kiss) was painted by Dmitri Vrubel on the East Side Gallery section of the Berlin Wall. Vrubel created the piece in the spring of 1990, just months after the border opened in November 1989 and shortly before the official reunification of Germany in October 1990. Photo by Ank Kumar, Infosys Limited (2015), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.