Why Art is Not a Luxury, But a Necessity

This is a moment for new cultural understandings.

The beautiful thing about culture is that we shape it, and it shapes us in return. Cultural strategy, which refers to the way in which art and storytelling influence a society’s beliefs and behaviors, is not an ornament to justice work; it is its foundation.

As Toni Morrison warned, “dictators and tyrants routinely begin their reigns and sustain their power with the deliberate and calculated destruction of art.” Her words remain chillingly true in this moment as we witness a renewed assault on cultural institutions.

We are living through an unsettling and uncertain moment of transition that is also full of possibility.  It is a time when the world is turned upside down, and our sense of normalcy is disrupted. Yet such moments also open the door for profound transformation, creativity, and solidarity. Paradoxically, repression can also mobilize movements. And within this current constraint, art and storytelling are strong tools for visioning and mobilization.

Let us embrace this paradox and create new possibilities through it.

The Art of Resistance

Each year, we collectively invest around $1.8 billion in arts and culture. This includes funding for museums, public broadcasting, libraries, cultural heritage sites, grants to artists, and community-based cultural agencies. Yet these investments are increasingly politicized, with resources now shifting away from work that celebrates diversity, imagination, and truth-telling.

This moment demands philanthropy to step in as public funding retreats.

As sociologists Lee Smithey and Lester Kurtz note, movements thrive when they engage in “repression management,”—shaping cultural responses that turn attempts at suppression into sparks for greater participation and power-building.

At BLIS Collective, we are doing just that. Our approach is grounded in our narrative research, particularly the hope gap we’ve identified within Black and Indigenous communities around reparations and Land Back:

• 76% of Black people support reparations, but only 21% believe they are feasible.

• 80% of Indigenous people support Land Back, but only 19% believe it is feasible.

Over the past year, we’ve used philanthropic support to invest in the creative infrastructure needed to help close the hope gap and help people imagine, believe in, and act toward a more just future.

• Digital Storytelling: We worked with BLIS member Garrison Hayes and content creator Kiana Pete to create content that translates our braided-narrative research for broader audiences. Garrison’s video on reparations and Land Back reached more than 250,000 viewers and proved more effective at increasing cross-community support than the single-issue videos. Kiana’s video and post, which connected our research to the braided histories of Seneca Village and the Lenape people, garnered over 50,000 views.

• Writer’s Retreats: We worked with BLIS member Brea Baker, on talking points ahead of her appearance on the Breakfast Club, where she challenged zero-sum narratives on land that often pit Black and Indigenous communities against each other. There she discussed her book, Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, and skillfully dismantled the scarcity myth, emphasizing that there is enough land for all of us to thrive. Brea brought this idea together through a BLIS-sponsored writers retreat that gathered other members like Kahlil Greene, Rebecca Nagle, Dr. Kyle Mays, Chelsea Hicks, and Jessi McEver, where they explored how to counter narratives ahead of the 250th anniversary.

• Narrative Frameworks & Art-Making: In our partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), BLIS co-created the Health Equity Narrative House, a shared narrative framework designed to align the Foundation and the broader health equity ecosystem around a common narrative north star. To bring this vision to life, we collaborated with RWJF grantee partner, Into Action Lab, to host a virtual creative event called the Creative Jam, which brought together over 70 artists, poets, designers, animators, and illustrators to bring the narrative house to life through art. The GIFs created during the Creative Jam have been used more than 800,000 times on Giphy and shared across social media over 1.5 million times.

This is the power of cultural infrastructure; it enables artists and storytellers, people who already hold creativity, trust, and influence across cultural spaces, to carry solidarity narratives into their own communities, close the hope gap, and move people from awareness to action.

Art is Not a Luxury

We titled this piece Art is Not a Luxury, in homage to Audre Lorde’s seminal essay Poetry is Not a Luxury, to speak to the urgency of funding art and cultural organizing in this moment.

We cannot achieve a multiracial democracy without a rigorous and public accounting of our history. We must pair this reckoning with the understanding that when we come together across race, gender, faith, geography, and even ideology, we can redefine what this country stands for. Together, we can write a new mission statement that fulfills the unfinished promise of “We the People.”

Doing this will require seeing art not as a luxury but as a necessity.

It will require radical resourcing to the most creative amongst us, the organizations bridging artists and organizers, the mass mobilizers, and all who are building cultural power for our collective survival.

About the Authors

Trevor Smith and Savannah Romero are co-founders of the BLIS Collective, an organization that sparks collaboration and narrative alignment between and within Black, Indigenous, and transformative social movements to repair, decolonize, and reshape culture.