Creative liberty: A case for the arts as essential to democracy

This article was featured in Arts Essential, a newsletter from the Performing Arts Program exploring the profound ways the arts impact, shape, and define the San Francisco Bay Area. 

The performing arts are both a reflecting and a reshaping force.

In a hyperpolarized era, when communities silo and individuals isolate, can creative impulse bring us together? Can the arts harness the histories and assumptions underlying our discord and move us toward a mutually beneficial future?

Building agency and shared power

For any individual experiencing or participating in the arts, their connection with the art creates agency. Organizations serving young people, like Destiny Arts and RYSE, move beyond developing aesthetic and creative abilities and explore how art can become civic engagement. The youth they serve learn to harness their power and develop their voices, which they can then raise to tell their own stories and those of their communities. That development of voice and perspective is critical to healthy democracies at every level, from the local to the national.

Arts advocates, like those leading the Watsonville Movement for Arts and Culture, are showing how the impact of creative agency reaches beyond performances, influencing economic development, nurturing a sense of belonging, supporting public health outcomes, and more. As co-leadership has grown within local arts organizations, the sector has the potential to become a training ground and a significant force in active civic engagement. With trust in institutions at all-time lows in the United States, the arts — with their ability to attract participation, develop agency, and distribute power — can be both a salve and a solution.

Bridging differences

The Bay Area cultural sector’s history has been shaped by ideas from around the world. The region is home to master artists, culture bearers, and creative innovators actively building bridges between disparate ideas, always creating a new sense of place and possibility. Longstanding arts hubs, like La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley and EastSide Arts Alliance in Oakland, as well as newer organizations like Mosaic America in Santa Clara County, create spaces for artists to initiate community dialogue across cultural, ethnic, and economic lines. With creativity and keen insight, the collective ability of artists and local organizations to embrace individual and community differences can be a powerful unifying force, particularly in a world where so many hesitate to engage with cultures, histories, and ideas different from their own.

“Creative liberty” represents each person’s freedom to express themselves according to their own creative interests, abilities, and imagination. It is an environment that recognizes each person’s unique voice, beliefs, and opinions. It is also what makes differences inevitable in both artistic expression and democratic society. Creating art — presenting and experiencing it, collaborating within and across communities to develop it — can undergird and help foster the highest purpose of a democracy: the articulation of the pluralistic will of the people. In our present age of polarization and discord, we see hope in how our local arts ecosystem so often brings together multiple perspectives to offer experiences that simultaneously honor individuality and propose a better future for all.

In times of conflict, what can the arts tell us about who we are and who we might become? We believe the performing arts have significant potential, not only to help us understand our past and dream of a better future, but also to actively reshape our region in the present moment.