Art, Social Change, and the Responsibility to Remember

Shared Missions of Witnessing and Remembrance

Art Works for Change^[1] was founded on the conviction that contemporary art can move beyond aesthetics to engage ethically and drive social transformation. Art can challenge indifference, confront silence, and create emotional and intellectual connections across cultures and histories. It can provide a space where difficult conversations become possible and where audiences are encouraged not only to observe the world, but to reflect on their own relationship to it.

Throughout my curatorial career, I have worked with artists whose practices address some of the most urgent issues of our time: violence against women, environmental collapse, war, displacement, human rights abuses, social inequality, and the fragility of democratic and ecological systems. Central to this work is the belief that art can function as a form of witnessing. It can communicate emotional truths that statistics, political rhetoric, and historical documentation alone often cannot. It allows us to encounter suffering, resilience, memory, and vulnerability in ways that are deeply human and potentially transformative.

This philosophy strongly resonates with the mission of the Research Institute on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery (RIMSS) in South Korea. Through its work preserving the testimonies and histories of former “Comfort Women,” RIMSS contributes to one of the most important continuing efforts in historical memory, gender justice, and human rights.

Although Art Works for Change and RIMSS emerge from different frameworks—one grounded in contemporary art and curatorial practice, the other in scholarship, testimony, and historical preservation—I see profound connections between our missions. Both organizations are concerned with how societies remember trauma and how difficult histories are passed across generations. Both understand that memory cannot survive solely within archives or academic discourse. Historical knowledge must also be emotionally experienced and ethically engaged. Otherwise, trauma risks becoming abstract, politicized, or forgotten.

A Journey of Discovering New Roles for Art

When I founded Art Works for Change in 2008, museums were rarely presenting thematic exhibitions devoted to urgent social and environmental issues. Relatively few artists were creating work that directly engaged with these topics at the time. My curatorial approach was shaped by my background in art therapy. It differed from more traditional art-historical models focused primarily on individual artists, styles, or movements. I was interested in the emotional and psychological dimensions of art: how artworks communicate feeling, reveal underlying meanings, and invite reflection on the human condition.

My first major curatorial project was a ten-year consulting role with the World Bank, where I helped build an international art collection representing its 175 member countries. The project offered a unique opportunity to observe how cultural values, history, and the environment are reflected in artistic expression. From German abstraction and the technological influences visible in the work of Korean artists such as Nam June Paik to the strong presence of landscape in Icelandic art, the collection revealed the diverse ways in which artists interpret their worlds.
This experience was followed by a six-year international touring exhibition for the Dalai Lama Foundation featuring nearly seventy artists. The exhibition explored values associated with the Dalai Lama, including peace, compassion, exile, impermanence, and personal transformation.

These early projects reinforced my belief that art can become a form of testimony. It can communicate not only information, but also the emotional and ethical dimensions of human experience. It can hold complexity without reducing it to a single narrative and can invite viewers to enter into another person’s reality.

Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women, and Art

Many exhibitions I have curated through Art Works for Change explore questions of memory, violence, resilience, and responsibility. One important example is Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art,^[2] an international multimedia exhibition that brought together artists addressing violence against women across different classes, ethnicities, or cultures, in societies affected by both peace and war. The exhibition examined many forms of violence, including sexual violence, trafficking, domestic abuse, war, exploitation, discrimination, and political oppression.
Featuring works by internationally recognized artists, Off the Beaten Path sought to raise awareness and encourage behavioral and social change. It aimed to strengthen the belief that communities can challenge cultures of violence, empower women and girls, and confront the systems that allow exploitation and discrimination to continue. Its purpose was not simply to shock audiences, but to create a thoughtful space in which they could reflect on the human realities behind these issues.

The work of the late Chinese American artist Hung Liu was especially powerful. Using archival photographs, including images of “Comfort Women,” as inspiration, her paintings transformed historical documents into deeply emotional acts of remembrance. Through blurred imagery, dripping paint, and layered surfaces, she restored humanity to women who had too often been erased or reduced to anonymous figures within history.

What stayed with me about Hung Liu’s work was the tenderness and dignity she brought to these women. She painted them not as symbols, but as people. Unlike archival photography, which may be approached primarily as evidence, painting can embody experience, perception, memory, and emotion. Liu’s work created a form of storytelling that could hold subjective experience without reducing it to a single definitive narrative.
Like Hung Liu, the other thirty-two artists from around the world helped create a new visual vocabulary for addressing violence against women. Their works encouraged audiences to feel and understand the human dimensions of violence, and through that process, to imagine the possibility of healing and transformation.

The Power of Witnessing

Over the years, I have increasingly come to see exhibitions not simply as presentations of art, but as spaces for reflection, dialogue, and human connection. Through Art Works for Change, I have sought to bring together artists, activists, educators, scholars, and nonprofit organizations and to encourage conversations that continue beyond museum walls.

One collaboration that deeply shaped my thinking was our work with the Center for Story and Witness, formerly known as the Voices and Faces Project, founded by Anne Ream. Its work centers on storytelling as a way to confront violence and silence. This collaboration reinforced for me the power of personal testimony.

Speaking publicly about trauma after years of silence is an act of courage and resistance. Testimony makes it possible for private suffering to enter public memory. It challenges denial and asks listeners to acknowledge both the reality of violence and the humanity of the person speaking. Artistic witnessing and survivor testimony are not identical, but they can support one another. Testimony communicates lived experience through the survivor’s own voice. Art can offer another way of encountering memory, emotion, loss, and resilience. Both resist silence. Both make visible what societies may prefer not to see. Both place a responsibility on the listener or viewer to respond ethically.

Art of Resilience

This idea of resilience has continued through many of my projects, including Survival Architecture and the Art of Resilience^[3] (exhibited in multiple cities between 2016 and 2020), which explored how artists and designers respond creatively to instability, displacement, and environmental crises. What interested me most was the search for meaning, connection, and hope under difficult circumstances. Resilience is not simply endurance. It is also the human ability to rebuild, adapt, and create new possibilities.

One of the projects featured in the exhibition was the EMPWR Coat, created by a Detroit-based organization Empowerment Plan. Designed to provide warmth and convert into a portable sleeping bag, the coat offers a practical and creative response to the needs of people experiencing homelessness.

That same concern with interconnectedness shaped Ethics + Excess + Extinction,^[4] an exhibition examining environmental destruction, consumerism, and mass extinction. Although environmental in focus, the exhibition was ultimately about responsibility: how systems of exploitation disconnect us from one another and from the consequences of our actions.

Again and again, my work returns to one central question: How do we remain emotionally connected in a world that so often encourages distraction, division, and indifference?

From Reflection to Action

The Environmental Leadership Training Program^[5], developed by Art Works for Change, reflects this concern with responsibility and engagement. Founded by Al Grumet in collaboration with the organization, the program was designed to connect young activists with mentors and help them develop critical leadership and communication skills. Grumet was particularly interested in children and environmental education. The goal was to help young people find a place in the climate movement that would be impactful, fulfilling, and sustainable. The program encouraged participants to understand that they, too, could become leaders and take responsibility for change.

One youth activist, Harita Kalvai, described the experience by saying, “My internship gave me the tools to learn about environmental justice and policy, and they are tools I can’t wait to keep using!” Harita worked with Al and other community leaders to create Words To Live By, a poetry event featuring teen poets’ perspectives on climate action. Their narratives addressed wildfire anxiety, environmental justice in marginalized communities, and other pressing concerns. The program also included keynote presentations. Organized during the global pandemic, the event succeeded in connecting members of the climate community at a time when physical gathering was difficult.

The experience helped Harita realize that international climate activism could have a home within her local California community and that events like this kind could spark broader conversations. She later formed Youth Action Through Art, a youth climate organization dedicated to intersectional environmentalism through art. In partnership with Art Works for Change and the local Citizens’ Climate Lobby chapter, the organization hosted art-centered events and exhibitions exploring the future of the world and the effect climate change may have on society.

Two other interns, Ethan Ngo and Ella Martin, began with a question: What do we want children growing up in today’s world to experience and understand at an early age? Together, they created EAK,^[6] a nonprofit group dedicated to fostering environmental awareness among students from kindergarten through sixth grade through coloring pages, games, and other creative activities. At the same time, Al Grumet developed Game Changers,^[7] a series of games designed to teach environmental responsibility in an engaging and accessible way.

These projects reflect a common belief: meaningful change begins with connection, curiosity, and empathy, especially when these qualities are encouraged from an early age. Art and creative education can move young people from awareness toward participation and help them imagine themselves as agents of change.

Making the Invisible Visible

There are important parallels between ecological destruction and other forms of systemic violence, including gender oppression and human trafficking. In each case, societies normalize forms of disconnection that allow suffering to become invisible. Violence becomes institutionalized when empathy erodes and individuals are reduced to abstractions.
Art cannot solve violence, historical trauma, environmental destruction, or injustice on its own. But it can create moments of pause and reflection. It can help people feel history rather than simply learn about it intellectually. It can remind us that suffering is never abstract because it always belongs to someone.

This belief also informed The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama,^[8] an exhibition bringing together seventy-nine contemporary artists whose works responded to themes of compassion, nonviolence, interdependence, and human dignity. The exhibition explores exile, temporality, impermanence, and paths toward personal and social transformation. These subjects ultimately concern how societies might heal historical wounds while preserving truth and accountability. Compassion in this context means remaining emotionally open to others’ suffering while continuing to affirm their dignity. It requires a willingness to encounter pain without turning away and to recognize that healing cannot be separated from truth.

Turbulence Landscape and the Movement of Memory

The recent exhibition of my own artwork, A Turbulent Landscape,^[9] extends many of these investigations through abstraction and immersive imagery. The work reflects my ongoing engagement with environmental, emotional, social, and political instability. It approaches turbulence not simply as chaos, but as a defining condition of contemporary existence. The abstract forms emerged from a desire to create environments that hold both anxiety and transformation simultaneously. They explore movement, rupture, and fluidity while also suggesting adaptation and emergence.

In many ways, the exhibition reflects my broader curatorial concerns with vulnerability and interconnectedness. I believe the concept of turbulence offers an important framework for thinking about historical memory itself. Trauma is rarely linear or fully resolved. Histories continue to reverberate across generations, cultures, and political systems. The past is never fully in the past.

Historical events leave traces that shape collective identities, community memories, and cultural narratives long after the events themselves have receded. Experiences of displacement, conflict, environmental loss, and social upheaval often persist as forms of collective trauma, resurfacing in both visible and invisible ways. Turbulence, in this sense, becomes a way of understanding how memory moves across time: unsettling, recurring, and transforming, yet continually influencing how individuals and societies navigate the present.

Platforms for Engagement

At Art Works for Change, I have always believed exhibitions can serve as physical platforms within museums for deeper engagement and collective reflection. Meaningful social change requires collaboration among artists, educators, activists, scholars, institutions, and communities. Art alone is not enough, but it can help create the emotional conditions necessary for empathy, awareness, and understanding. We therefore make an effort to engage existing nonprofit organizations and institutions in our programming and to connect artistic experiences with continuing education and social action.

Today, in a time shaped by misinformation, political division, and historical denial, the work of preserving memory feels more urgent than ever. Contemporary art institutions share this responsibility. Art can function simultaneously as witness, memorial, critique, and catalyst. It can restore visibility and humanity to individuals and communities whose histories have been marginalized or suppressed. It can encourage audiences to move beyond passive observation toward ethical engagement.

The relationship among testimony, artistic remembrance, and public engagement lies at the heart of this work. Survivors who speak about violence after years of silence perform an extraordinary act of courage, resisting forces that seek to deny, minimize, or erase their suffering. Artists who engage with these histories assume a different but related responsibility. Through images, materials, stories, and spaces, they can preserve emotional truths, restore individuality, and help audiences encounter the past as a living human reality. Viewers and readers also have a responsibility. Witnessing is not a passive act. It requires us to listen, remember, reflect, and resist forgetting. It means refusing to reduce suffering to an abstraction or to treat history as disconnected from the present.

This is where I see the strongest connection between Art Works for Change and RIMSS. Art cannot replace archives, survivor testimony, historical research, or education, but it can work alongside them. It can make historical knowledge emotionally present and create spaces in which difficult memories are encountered with empathy and care. Bearing witness, therefore, means more than observing the suffering of others. It is a commitment to human dignity, historical accountability, and our shared responsibility to one another.