Art in Crisis: Making Meaning When the World Is on Fire

By Amie McNee

When the air feels charged with alarm, it’s tempting to retreat behind screens or into the warmth of routine. Yet art has a stubborn vocation: to name what is hard to name, to hold space for fear without letting it erase our humanity, and to improvise meaning where meaning seems scarce. The case for making art in times of crisis isn’t a luxury; it’s a form of citizenship. It asks us to show up—with charcoal and conscience, with software and song, with a shared will to bear witness and to imagine a way forward.

Art doesn’t erase danger, and it doesn’t pretend that danger isn’t real. It translates danger into something legible, something that can be acted upon. In moments of upheaval—whether climate chaos, political violence, or communal grief—creative practice becomes a way to test what we care about, to map what we still believe in, and to invite others to participate in the work of repair.

Why art matters in times of crisis

There are four interlocking roles that art often plays when the world feels unstable:

• Memory and testimony: Art preserves voices, scenes, and emotions that statistics can’t fully capture. It creates artifacts—images, poems, songs—that future generations can encounter and interrogate.
• Empathy and solidarity: Creative work makes room for different perspectives, helping strangers become neighbors. Shared making can melt isolation into connection.
• Accountability and courage: Visual and narrative work can name power, expose harm, and demand accountability, moving conversations from abstract critique toward concrete action.
• Resilience and imagination: Art rehearses possible futures, offering outlets for hope, critique, and collective experimentation when solutions feel scarce.

Mediums that carry meaning when the world is on fire

Any medium can carry weight in a crisis, but some approaches tend to sustain communities best by combining reach with nuance:

• Public art and murals: Large-scale works transform blank walls into living conversations, inviting passersby to pause, reflect, and respond.
• Zines and micro-publishing: Low-cost formats democratize voice, enabling marginalized stories to circulate and multiply.
• Performance and sound: Readings, street performances, or ambient soundscapes can shift mood, trigger memory, and mobilize collective action.
• Digital storytelling and data visualization: Visuals that narrate lived experience alongside data make complex crises more navigable and tangible.
• Community collaborations: Co-created works—collages, theater, workshops—embed care into process, not just product.

Art is a stubborn instrument for truth-telling—quiet enough to listen, loud enough to be heard, and stubborn enough to carry us through the counting of days.

Starting small: practical steps to begin making during upheaval

You don’t need a grand commission to start. Here are approachable entry points that honor both craft and care:

• Set a tiny prompt: Choose a single theme (loss, memory, hope) and create one piece in a week—no more than 90 minutes of focused work.
• Schedule safe making time: Protect a recurring window—even 60 minutes—that you treat as a deliberate act of care for yourself and others.
• Invite neighbors into the process: Host a small, pop-up making session in a community space or online, where people bring materials and voices in equal measure.
• Use accessible materials: Paper, chalk, fabric scraps, or digital tools with free licenses; the point is participation, not polish.
• Document and reflect: Capture the process through notes or brief recordings, then share what you learned with the group to deepen the conversation.

A vignette from the threshold

In a neighborhood still grieving a recent storm, a circle of residents gathered in a shuttered storefront. Over the course of a single afternoon, they pasted torn posters onto the glass, each piece bearing a memory from someone who had lived there before the flood. A teenager drew a map of routes to safety, an elder stitched a quilt from fabric swatches salvaged from the flood, and a pharmacist read from a notebook of letters left in a bottle by a family who had fled. By the end of the day, the storefront looked like a chorus of voices—a tangible reminder that community isn’t a backdrop to disaster, but the living material of recovery.

That simple act—taking materials, space, and time—became a communal signal: we will not surrender meaning to fear. We will make it, together.

What we gain when we make art together in crisis

When people collaborate on art amid crisis, several benefits tend to accumulate:

• Shared responsibility: The burden of crisis feels lighter when it’s distributed across a group.
• Expanded moral imagination: Different voices broaden the possible responses to a problem.
• Visible care: Public-making demonstrates commitment, not just concern, and invites others to participate.
• Longer-lasting impact: Art creates cues, rituals, and artifacts that outlive a single news cycle and inform future action.

In times of feverish uncertainty, art isn’t a retreat from reality—it is a disciplined response to reality. It orients us toward what we value, it preserves what matters, and it activates people to imagine, test, and enact a different path forward. The world may feel combustible, but our capacity to respond with art remains a durable counterweight—an invitation to begin again, together.