Director’s letter

Welcome to the Ford Foundation Gallery. I am honored to be tasked with bringing this new project to life. The gallery offers a unique opportunity to share the Ford Foundation’s vision of social justice in an intimate new forum, and to bring bold ideas that inspire change to a broader audience.

Creative expression is essential to justice. This understanding has always been at the heart of the foundation’s work. We believe that any effort to seek social justice must reckon with the underlying causes and devastating impacts of inequality. In many of these efforts, this means coming to terms with what we know through lived experience, history, and data.

In the hands of artists, the intellectual understanding of injustice comes to life in story, song, movement, images, and objects. Art guides us to imagine new realities and discover the truth. Our imagination transports us to worlds both known and unknown. In art, we find community—we see ourselves reflected together with others, and recognize all that connects us across lands, languages, religions, and races.  

My wish for this space is for it to bring people together, and in doing so to deepen our understanding of our shared humanity. It is through small deeds and big ideas, individual conversations and collective action, that together, we move toward justice. We move toward a whole society and begin to heal.

I am immensely grateful for the many voices that come together in this work—most especially for the artists whose work offers us the opportunity for transformation through empathy and fellowship. Your work reaches far beyond these four walls.   

I am inspired by what’s ahead.

Lisa Kim