The powerful and graceful words that Amanda Gorman breathed into being in her Inaugural Poem captured the pain and promise of our recent history. "And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken but simply unfinished."
And therein lies the hope that persists in the unseen, the yet unknown, the barely yet imagined. It is the kernel of the promise of what it means to be a player in this grand democratic experiment that we call America. And it asks us to imagine the not yet realized, to visualize the possible, and to fan sparks into life even from ashen waste.
And that is the thing.
And it an artful thing.
In arts education (and arts expression, for that matter) we cultivate our collective capacity to imagine the unseen, to bring into the physical world those things that we can scarcely imagine. Art requires us to reflect, to gather information, to have a viewpoint, and to bring our best skill and imagination to the fore. These are essential skills of art-making. And of effective organizations, and public policy-making.
As we walk forward as a people in a future yet uncertain, but ripe with promise, let us do so with the kind of imagination and creativity of the artist. As poet Gorman reminds us so eloquently, history has its eyes on us.