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…
A broken bowl is easy to discard. A kintsugi bowl asks a different question. What if the break is not the end of the story? In the Japanese art of kintsugi, shattered ceramics are repaired with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The cracks are not concealed. They become part of the object’s history. Democracies break, too. Trust…
When Nations Lose Their Minds, Artists Help Them Remember From fascism to apartheid, history shows the arts do more than protest. They preserve truth, protect imagination, and help societies find their way back. The twentieth century offered repeated examples of governments trying to define reality for everyone else. In Nazi Germany, modern art was condemned…
Writers, musicians, actors, filmmakers, designers, and other culture-makers spend their lives imagining new possibilities. What happens when they turn that creative power toward civic life? The Future Won’t Imagine Itself We live at a time when corruption, greed, control, prejudice, boorishness, and denial are idealized. Often weaponized. Most of us recognize this. Many of us…
Whether you paint, write, design, or perform, we can out-imagine and outmaneuver political malevolence. Our nation’s creators were preemptive In 1787, 55 delegates sat in a sweltering Philadelphia room and drafted the United States Constitution. They didn’t just tweak an existing system; they designed a representative framework from scratch, balancing democratic participation with structural checks…
There is a conversation that has been waiting to happen. Not between politicians and constituents. Not between policy experts and the public. Between a writer and a trumpeter. Between a filmmaker and a choreographer. Between a painter and a game designer. Between artists who have spent their lives inside the most demanding truth-telling work democracy…
Creative intelligence is the ability to generate new and valuable ideas, bridge gaps between familiar things in unexpected ways, and provide practical solutions to unfamiliar problems. Artists do this every damn day. Do civic leaders and politicians? No, not when they’re swinging around on the monkey bars of rigid partisanship, dogmatic orthodoxy, transactional subservience, and…
Let’s put it simply: We need a nonprofit entity for individual artists, creators, and makers across all disciplines. Not a union. Not an arts advocacy organization. Not a public relations campaign. Not a government agency. We already have those. Individual artists deserve a republic of our own. Creative practitioners are needed for the Reconstruction ahead. We…
Lately, I’ve been wondering whether journalists could be considered artists. I’ve come to the decision that they were not considered artists until Americans were dumbed-down by cable television, the media oligarchy, and the internet. All one needs to do is watch Fox News to witness a new absurdist theatre. In the history of real news, however, editorial cartoonists have…
What I want (and what I believe many of us want) is a way to use our creative intelligence to restore cultural clarity and strengthen our democratic life. That’s why I am launching Res Creativa. Res Creativa will be a network for creative intelligence, uniting artists and creative thinkers across disciplines to help shape a healthier democratic culture.…