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What is the role of art and culture for racial justice?

Founder of Vision & Justice | Harvard Associate Professor | Bestselling Author of The Rise and The Unseen Truth

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How Images Shape Our Understanding of Justice (16:50)

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How Have the Arts Galvanized Social Movements? (5:23)

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Can Art Measure Human Life? (3:22)

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How Images Can Contextualize History (4:14)

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The Power of Images to Counteract Racism (8:10)

Lavin Exclusive Speaker

To build a better story for our democracy, we must be able to see the people who have been left out, says Sarah Lewis, founder of Vision & Justice and bestselling author of The Unseen Truth and The Rise. As one of the most insightful and eloquent speakers on race in America, Sarah proves that visual representations (from photographs to performances) can spark action and set us on the path to a more just future. Harvard professor Imani Perry calls Sarah’s work “a watershed in the study of art, social, and cultural history.” Sarah has served on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee and been selected for Oprah’s “Power List”—in spellbinding talks, she offers a unique perspective into how we can shift our cultural narratives to ensure everyone is seen and represented, and how we can harness failure to achieve radical innovation. “Where we once blocked our rightful view of one another, we now have the means to build windows,” she says.

The Unseen Truth isn’t just a groundbreaking work of visionary scholarship. It’s an earthquake.”—Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard Professor

“Every two minutes we create as many images as were created in the entire 19th century,” says Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. “We’re reading images as much as we’re seeing them. There is a language and a syntax and a grammar to them.” And although we are voracious readers, how literate are we? Sociologists tell us that we’re engaging less and less with those who are different from us, curating our own visual content that affirms our existing biases and beliefs. And this, Sarah says, distorts our notions of “who belongs, who counts, and what humanity looks like.”

Sarah is the founder of Vision & Justice, a catalytic civic initiative that reveals the foundational role visual culture plays in generating equity and justice in America. At Harvard, she pioneered the course Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which she continues to teach and which is now part of the university’s core curriculum.

Her latest book, The Unseen Truth (an Amazon bestseller), reveals one of the greatest lies we’ve been told about race in this country, and how we can move past it. She tells the story of the Caucasian war—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the U.S. Civil War—and how it showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness actually wasn’t white at all. She shows how visual tactics concealed the truth in order to secure our regime of racial injustice, and how we can begin to see what we have ignored and start to dismantle this regime. Harvard professor Imani Perry says that she “illuminates what it means to both ‘see’ and create race, deepening our ability to pursue justice.”

She is also the bestselling author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, a story-driven investigation into a biography of an idea—a big idea—that no current term yet captures. It reveals the secrets behind creative human endeavor, and how innovation, mastery, and new concepts are found in unlikely places. The New York Times writes that “Lewis’s voice is so lyrical and engaging that her book, The Rise, can be read in one sitting,” while Junot Diaz praises it as “exhilarating, inspiring, profound and so beautifully written it left me breathless.” It has been translated into six languages to date.

Sarah’s talks urgently address the world we are living in right now, gathering various threads—art history, technical innovation, race, photography, the story of America, and her own deeply personal narrative—to elucidate the power of art to ignite transformative social change. This combination of urgency, hope, and clear, compelling analysis keeps her lecture halls packed; it’s the reason her award-winning “Vision and Justice” issue of Aperture Magazine (now in its fourth printing) and bestselling book The Unseen Truth have garnered unprecedented press coverage and changed the national conversation on race. Clint Smith, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed, says that “it is almost as if Sarah Lewis has given us a new pair of glasses that allow us to see history in ways that were previously unclear. Lewis has provided us with an indispensable resource to better see ourselves.”

Sarah has spoken to top-tier organizations from Prada to ABC to United Way. Her mainstage TED talk received over 2.8 million views and she was a closing speaker at SXSW. She was prominently featured in HBO’s Black Art: In the Absence of Light, a “rich and absorbing” documentary exploring two centuries of art by African-Americans, and the path they forged for contemporary Black artists. Sarah’s scholarship has also been profiled by The New York TimesThe Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, to name a few. She was on Oprah’s “Power List,” served on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee, and was the inaugural recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The award honors Lewis for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African-Americans.”

An associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies, Sarah focuses on the intersection of African American and Black Atlantic visual representation, racial justice, and representational democracy in the United States. Her forthcoming publications include Vision & Justice (One World/Random House, Fall 2025), and Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law.

Testimonials

Sarah was absolutely, 100% amazingly awesome! I cannot overstate how she engaged with the audience and delivered such a great talk and time with them. She even stayed a bit longer to accommodate her long-line of people wanting to sign her book and have a few moments with her. It was the absolute perfect way for us to kick off our event. We were so grateful to have her there!

Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association
Testimonials

You have no idea how many people came up to me Saturday afternoon who were transformed by your presentation. Thank you so very much for joining us and for having the courage to participate! You were vital to making sense of that whole topic.

Kennedy Center
Testimonials

You were the perfect balance—great stories, so joyful, lots of insights that helped our audience. I hope you could sense that everyone is leaving thinking about things differently, and are, most importantly, happy.

LSAC
Testimonials

As I opened the Global PR Summit feedback survey today, I realized that you deserve kudos directly from everyone who attended for bringing in Sarah Lewis. I had heard that she speaks even more eloquently than her book reads, but didn’t believe it until seeing her in action.

Holmes Global PR Summit
Testimonials

Sarah’s keynote was the perfect affirmation of support for the arts and so much more. The generosity and grace of her work set a tone that was present throughout the convening, and we heard so much gratitude from everyone who saw her presentation—including the hotel staff and AV technicians! It meant a lot to the artists in the room to have someone like Sarah there, and her perspective on culture really nurtured the camaraderie built among the artist cohort.

The USA Team
Testimonials

I don’t think it is possible to overstate the impact your presence had on our students and faculty. People were inspired, moved, and affirmed by you. Your work is incredible and your presence and warmth are equally compelling. Thank you for making the trip, for sharing with such genuine enthusiasm, and for continuing to engage the students who follow up with you.

The Brearley School
Testimonials

Sarah’s presence and her words were deeply inspiring and so relevant to the educators at our event. She made a tremendous impact. We were so pleased. And thank you for all of your assistance in the process. You were so integral to the evening’s success.

North Carolina Museum of Art

Speech Topics

Race
Vision & JusticeImages and Our Fight for Equity

Who is represented in our art, photographs, and performances? Who is left out?

For too long, people of color have been marginalized in our democracy, says Sarah Elizabeth Lewis—both in the political and cultural realms. But we can change that. In this urgent and hopeful talk, she demonstrates how we can use images and other visual representations to expand the cultural narrative for the better. She draws on her storied career as a curator, author, and founder of Vision & Justice to offer a powerful argument for the necessary work of “re-seeing,” so that we can see one another clearly and fight for a better future together.

Gathering in various threads—art history, technical innovation, race, photography, the story of America, and a deeply personal narrative—Sarah celebrates individual artists, sparks the collective imagination, and helps us see what is right in front of us, as well as what could be. “I don’t think that we see the world,” she says. “I think we actually read the world through a series of perceived narratives. It takes the work of the image—the work of our vision—to state the truth.”

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Innovation
The RiseCreativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

Where do new ideas spring from? What really drives iconic, transformational change on both a personal and an organizational level? From Nobel Prize-winning discoveries to works of art, many of our creative triumphs are not achievements but conversions, argues Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, author of The Rise. And when we fail, that’s when we know we’re on the road to success.

Sarah draws on figures such as abolitionist Frederick Douglass and grit pioneer Angela Duckworth, revealing the importance of play, grit, surrender, often ignored ideas, and the necessary experiments and follow-up attempts that lead to true breakthroughs. Uplifting and counterintuitive, this keynote will equip you to harness failure, tap into your creative potential, and seek radical innovation in your personal and professional life. The path to success, Sarah notes, is often more surprising than we expect.

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