Missing Opportunities: Arts and Social Justice

On Community Arts Network, a San Francisco Public Health official offers her thoughts on the connection between arts and social change.

Artists not only document social change; they promote, inform, and shape it. Whether through music, plays, graphics, paintings, songs, films, media, architecture, textiles, jewelry, photography, poetry, sculpture, pottery, landscapes, written word, spoken word, dance – art is powerful. And it is San Francisco’s greatest, most cost-effective missed opportunity. For art is the intellectual underpinning of social change; nowhere is there more potential and more need for art than here and now.