“The work that artists do is we take the world and we filter it through the lens of our own experiences, and some of that is the self-expression part, but I think much deeper than that, artists bear witness. That’s our job.”
– Artist
Mimi Ọnụọha, on the role of artists in society. Drawing from the wisdom of
Toni Morrison and
James Baldwin, the Nigerian-American artist asserts that bearing witness is crucial in authoritarian moments when our “sense of what reality is feels unmoored and unstable.”