There is a sculpture by the seminal artist Richard Serra entitled “Sequence.” The piece is massive. Breathtaking.
Viewed from afar, as I first did from the gentle blond wood bleachers at the SF Museum of Modern Art when it was there, it is easy to appreciate its grace and elegance. The gentle swirls turning in on themselves have their own kind of music. And that could have been enough. But there was more to this moving sculpture, I was to discover.
Walking up to consider the piece more closely, I was taken aback by the deep patina of its surface. “Sequence” had lived a former life outdoors at Stanford’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts (a home to which it was to return in due time). The steel walls of the piece rough and rich with the patina of its dance with the elements. There were deep hues or orange and brown, spots of rust, and gritty texture that had been invisible when viewed from my perch on the bleachers just moments before. I interacted with this deep sense of texture in a visceral way. And a way wholly different from how I had been swept up in the gentle majesty of the piece only moments prior.
But wait. There was more. The piece was so massive that you could, quite literally, walk into it. Its massive, gently angled walls creating corridors and small rooms of a sort. What had been visual observation before quickly gave way to sheer feeling when you walked inside. The curved, sloping walls somehow oppressive and overwhelming once you were inside of the piece. A riveting, and wholly unique, experience.
I’ve often reflected on these unique experiences of this one sculpture. It wasn’t shifting or morphing somehow. It was quite spectacularly stable and unyielding. But what changed was my point of view.
How many things in life seem wholly different based on the vantage point from which we experience them? In public policy, for example, we experience the same thing quite differently based on our distance from it. Take immigration, for example, where public policy looks like a horse of a different color from a distance, where our notions of belonging and otherness are viewed from afar. Come closer in, though, understand that these are people wit lives and families, hopes and dreams, and abstract policy decisions suddenly take on much more texture and complexity. Walk even further inside of these policies, and live them, and the oppressive and life-altering impact of the policies become quite stark and only too real.
Our public policy and societal conversations around race, white privilege, and social justice are the same. These conversation might seem abstract and academic for those resting squarely in lives of privilege and distance, while the dimensions and implications of our decisions in this space are immediate, and granular, and real for those who are not the beneficiaries of that privilege. And it is from them, form those deep inside the lives experience of policy, that we can learn.
In Artful Leadership, we talk of humility. To be plain, the stance of the humble leader isn’t about politeness or dissembling. It is about understanding that one’s own experience is necessarily defined by the contours of our own, unique experience and valuing the depth of knowing that is present to us when we are humble enough to listen and to learn to the experiences of those who are deeper inside the contours of the metaphorical sculpture.
I invite us all this week - particularly this week when so much is shifting in our political and social spheres, that we take time to consider the world from the vantage point of someone who the policy actions that we are discussing most directly impacts. Doing so necessarily changes our points of view and pushes us towards leadership and public policy that is more nuanced, and compassionate, and that advances the cause of social justice. And we will all be better for it.