New perspectives, new beginnings
Richard Serra’s extraordinary Union of the Torus and the Sphere rises like a ship’s hull in a narrow, bright-white room at Dia: Beacon. Its heavy steel lists as if warped by a gentle breeze. Standing back at one end of the sculpture, you appreciate the scale and weight and the impressive construction of the piece. But you have to walk around it to experience it. The work provokes a relationship.
On one side of the sculpture, the steel curves up and away from you, guiding your gaze toward the bright ceiling and sky beyond. A few steps later, reaching the opposite side, the work looms imposingly overhead, threatening to crush you and narrowing your view of the light above.
Serra’s sculpture resonates with me deeply because it’s an apt metaphor for what I aim to do in my work. In engaging viewers to experience one side and then the other, Serra invites us to contend with different perspectives of the same thing. The experience of those dramatically different perspectives evokes a range of reactions, complicates our thinking, and changes our perceptions.
I am neither an artist nor a scholar of art, but I love art, in particular for its power to make us think and to connect us to one another through understanding and shared experience. My life’s work has been about making people think and helping to build connection through understanding, too. I did that first as a newspaper reporter, and for the past 20 years, I’ve done it primarily in strategic communications for colleges and universities. And now I’m launching my own consultancy, aiming to use my skills and experiences in service to a diversity of organizations and individuals whose work is making our world better.
I believe in the power of communications to bridge divides and advance understanding. I’ve seen it again and again on college campuses, where a crucial aspiration is to do something our society at large seems wholly unable to do these days: create a community that regards diversity of thought and perspective not as a challenge, but rather as essential to learning and growth. When they land on college campuses, many students find themselves in the most diverse communities they’ve ever been in, with peers, faculty, and staff from all over the world, from all backgrounds and with all manner of political views and religious beliefs. Students learn best and grow the most when they get close to what’s different (as Brené Brown says, “People are hard to hate close up. Move in.”).
That’s why, a few years ago, when I was leading communications and marketing at Trinity College in Hartford, we invited StoryCorps to bring its terrific One Small Step initiative to our campus, to spend three days recording facilitated conversations between pairs of people on opposite ends of the political spectrum. The brilliance of this initiative is that it’s meant to do exactly what Brown says: to move in, get close, and connect, not by debating politics, but by getting to know one another as people. The One Small Step event at Trinity came on the heels of a yearlong initiative at the college, “Bridging Divides: Higher Education’s Role in Advancing Understanding and Promoting a Just Society,” that explored race and racism, academic freedom and freedom of speech, and power and privilege.
From a strategic positioning standpoint, I wanted the One Small Step event to help Trinity make the case for the value and relevance of a liberal arts education, and I wanted the partnership with a trusted national brand such as StoryCorps to raise Trinity’s visibility and instill pride among our alumni and parent/family communities. It did all of those things. But more fundamentally, I wanted to harness the power of communications to do the work of bringing together our community.
As I believe in the power of communications to bring us together, I believe, in turn, in the power of community to change the world. I am inspired every day by individuals and organizations making positive change: expanding educational and economic opportunity, advancing equity and inclusion, addressing climate change, advocating for peace, improving global health, and creating knowledge and art for the world. I am excited and privileged to endeavor to partner with such folks to help advance their causes.
