Bowls contributed by the Art Creation Foundation For Children

By Lauren Seibert, ACT:S Advocacy & Campaigns Fellow

Cradling a little paper maché bowl hand-painted by a Haitian child, I felt the immediacy of the situation in Haiti sink home in a new way. Holding something that their own hands shaped—the same hands that probably helped rig up tents to live in after the earthquake—suddenly woke me up more than any news updates ever had. That’s one of the things art does best: it wakes you up, shakes you up, makes you rethink what you know.

Art can do what so many other forms of advocacy can’t: it can morph and evolve into a personal thing, something that we can associate with our own experiences. It tugs on our emotions. It fills our brains with tangible sensations—color, texture, sound. Want to make an issue come alive for your audience? Art can do that, and people will remember it long after they forget about the pamphlet on Haiti relief tucked in their pocket.

This time, a display of paper maché bowls painted with stars and watermelons made me think of my own childhood, and then those kids in Haiti suddenly became real. Those bowls, along with photographs taken in Haiti by National Geographic photojournalist Maggie Steber, hand-sequined flags by Haitian artists, and photos taken by Haitian children themselves formed the exhibit “Through Their Eyes: Haitian Artists’ Visions of Home” at the Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery in D.C. during the past month.