Art Is A Teacher of Empathy

Art has been used to tell stories, to preserve, to remember, to predict, to persuade, to inspire and to express. The intentions (or happy accidents) are limitless. One thing that remains constant however, no matter the outcome, is that art always requires interpretation. These are the words Grahame Lynch, a professor that heavily influenced my way of thinking and design.

In this TEDxTalk, the artist, designer, and educator Grahame Lynch says that art can and should play a key role in teaching empathy and understanding human difference. There are so many things art is known for… expression, preservation, etc…. however teaching is not something that comes to mind. I find Grahame’s work inspiring in that he speaks to the purpose of his work as a gateway for learning. His work is meant to engage the viewer to experience the process of vision differently. Grahame himself has always had a visual impairment condition where his eyes move independently from each other, he has dealt with this since birth and was actually told at the age of eight to prepare for blindness by a surgeon right before surgery. He grew up seeing things jittering in front of him, and learned to make sense of the world moving around him through the pursuit of visual art. “Drawing and painting was how I was understanding people’s mannerisms because I couldn’t see them,” he said. And in 2011 he said, “the ability to read is the fist thing slipping as my vision changes.” This is the experience Grahame tries to recreated through his work. Not only to experience to learn to understand this different way of seeing, but also to understand the value of what you have while you still have it. In this instance, the ability of sight.

His hope is that his work can teach to understand and appreciate differences, in his case he is immersing “viewers” of his work into becoming participants of it and partaking in the experience of a culture that literally sees the world differently. Grahame tries to recreate his experience of vision through his work. “… Immersing ourselves into cultural experience is a very very important thing to do. We need to move beyond observers. We need to take that leap into immersive experience to understand each other.” His work extends further by not only giving the experience, but he also hopes it sparks an understanding to really value what you have while you still have it. In this instance, the ability of sight. This extent of willingness to accept others as they are is a unique skill, trying to teach this skill to others through art is inspiring. This approach to art and design as a whole is a holistic view that accepts differences in culture on all levels globally and I believe it should be practised by global communication leaders guiding the commercial and artistic world of creating experiences for others.

For me, he was a professor of typography as well my capstone advisor in senior year, I will never forget when I showed him my sketches for our first assignment and he asked me, “do you know Josef Muller-Brockman?” I didn’t (how embarrassing that would be now). I remember going home to look him up and was stunned. I had intuitively nearly copied Brockman’s layouts. Even the tilted degree of the objects in my poster synced with his! It was that moment that made me realize I could be a good designer, and if I truly put effort I could hopefully be great. What are the chances of intuitively following the same layout as a design legend? I had no smart phone back then and spent only enough time to get school assignments done on the computer. No Facebook. Nada. This coincidence was purely intuitive. And it felt amazing. I feel this is almost impossible in today’s world with the intrinsic connection to the internet of Generation Edge. So many things are seen subconsciously you can never really know how intuitive your work truly is. It is a new way to experience art and it goes back to saying all of it still requires interpretation and that art is a key modem for teaching empathy and understanding.