These essays trace the ideas, questions, and conversations that led to Res Creativa.
Written over time, they explore what artists and the arts can contribute to democracy, civic life, and the future we share.
Read them in reverse chronological order to see how the thinking has developed, challenged itself, and grown into the work Res Creativa is doing today.
Blanket, Collection history unknown; formerly in the collection of Sarah Gibbs Thompson Pell (Mrs. Stephen H. P. Pell, 1878-1939); donated to MAI by Sarah Pell in 1933. National Museum of the American Indian, CC0
Through press conferences, conventions, rallies, and speeches, political leaders use narrative, character, emotion, music, visual design, and symbolism to shape public feelings. So does theatre. Political performances and theatrical plays can also share examinations of justice, power, war, identity, responsibility, and communal life. Both can be entertaining. Both can be unnerving. Only one type of…
The Arts in Healing Across every art form, creative practice helps people endure illness, injury, grief, and trauma. The arts make difficult experiences easier to hold. They reduce isolation, restore a sense of agency, and help the body and mind begin the work of recovery. A Different Picture Sometimes making art gives a person somewhere…
What do you reach for when you are emotionally exhausted? When a situation feels so bleak that improvement seems impossible? When I was a boy, I would make something. Anything. In my teens, I wrote poetry (of course). Later in life, I slipped on my running shoes and took off, often through cities where every…
Last week was hard. Each morning seemed to bring another reminder of how fragile our common life has become. We mourned beloved artists whose work had quietly accompanied us for decades. Floods, fires, and storms swept away homes and livelihoods. Civilians were assaulted in cities that once felt ordinary. Political decisions continued to unsettle institutions…
Mapmakers once filled unknown regions with lions and monsters. The phrase hic sunt leones did not appear everywhere, but the instinct did. Where knowledge ended, imagination supplied danger. We still do this. We draw lions around people we do not know, histories we avoid, and futures we cannot control. Political leaders exploit that instinct. They…
I have become increasingly suspicious of the phrase unprecedented times. During my lifetime, I’ve watched Americans practice hiding beneath school desks in preparation for nuclear war. I’ve watched a president resign in disgrace. I’ve watched the Berlin Wall fall, the internet transform daily life, and two airplanes change the way an entire nation thought about safety.…
The imagination has a curious double life. It allows us to invent symphonies and constitutions. It also allows us to invent enemies. That may sound like a contradiction, but it is simply a truth about being human. The same faculty that helps us envision a better future can also persuade us that people we barely know…
Res Creativa has been quietly shifting over the past several weeks. It has evolved from an idea into a place people can enter, explore, and help shape. The Res Creativa website is now live: rescreativa.org It gives our work a home beyond the newsletter: a space for our essays, our founders, and the early conversations…
No one rehearses a fire drill because they hope for a fire. No orchestra rehearses because the concert has already happened. A rehearsal is where habits form before the moment they are needed. We rehearse not because we know what will happen, but because we want to become the kind of people who can respond well…
Musicians understand something policymakers have largely forgotten: tradition is not the enemy of innovation. Every musician begins with an inheritance. A jazz standard has a structure. A sonnet has fourteen lines. A blues progression has twelve bars. A fugue has rules. A raga has conventions. Even improvisation happens within a shared framework. Form is not…
