Democracy Is Built Twice: Why Artists Belong at the Center of the Conversation
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This spring, I found myself in a room that, on paper, might seem like an unusual place for the executive director of a neighborhood arts organization.
At Howard University’s 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy Symposium, held on April 10, 2026, constitutional scholars, historians, legal advocates, organizers, government officials, public intellectuals, artists, and arts leaders gathered to grapple with the Reconstruction Amendments and the unfinished project of building a truly free, equal, and democratic society.
I may have been one of only a few participants whose work was rooted in arts and culture, which made it even more striking that one of the most compelling arguments for the role of artists didn’t come from me.
It came from the structure of the 14th Amendment Center itself.
Alongside Law & Policy, Education, Curriculum & Scholarship, and Democratic Institutions sits a fourth pillar: Art, Imagination, & Narrative. The decision to include art feels profound. By placing Art, Imagination, & Narrative alongside law, education, and democratic institutions, the Center’s visionary founder, Sherrilyn Ifill suggests that democracy is not built by policy alone. It is also built through culture, story, and imagination.
Much of the symposium explored the Fourteenth Amendment not simply as a constitutional amendment, but as an attempt to refound American democracy. After the Civil War, the nation faced an extraordinary question: What kind of country should emerge from fracture? The Fourteenth Amendment became one answer.
It expanded citizenship for a few, sought to guarantee equal protection under the law, and attempted to realize promises that had been declared decades earlier but never fully embedded in the Constitution itself. As several speakers noted, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed equality, yet the original Constitution left those aspirations largely unrealized.
The Fourteenth Amendment represented an effort to imagine a different nation. Albeit an unfinished one.
One idea echoed throughout the symposium and has stayed with me ever since: Infrastructure follows narrative. Or, maybe more accurately: Narrative drives infrastructure. And as we champion here at The Laundromat Project, alongside our many peers, collaborators, and co-creators: Culture drives narrative. So, if narrative shapes infrastructure, then culture helps shape infrastructure too.
The stories we tell about who belongs, who deserves opportunity, and what futures are possible ultimately shape the institutions we build.
That’s why I found the Center’s inclusion of Art, Imagination & Narrative so significant.
Too often, artists are invited into conversations after policies have been written—as communicators, illustrators, or translators. But if narrative shapes infrastructure, then artists belong at the beginning. History offers us a powerful example.
The Civil Rights Movement did not begin with legislation. It began with people demanding that America understand Black humanity differently. Artists, musicians, writers, photographers, organizers, preachers, and everyday citizens reshaped the nation’s moral imagination long before the Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Act became law. And culture helped create the public will that made legislative change possible.
Policy followed.
The same could be said of Reconstruction itself. Every meaningful expansion of democracy has required people to imagine a world that did not yet exist before they could build it. Artists help us ask the questions policy alone cannot answer. They give language to futures institutions have yet to imagine and create the cultural conditions that make structural change possible.
As Sade Lythcott reflected during the symposium, we must imagine structures capable of holding our liberation.
And as Sherrilyn Ifill reminded us, artists need the conditions to do that work. They need to be able to live, to create, and to do so safely. The responsibility of our institutions is to build the infrastructure that makes that imagination possible.
Following the symposium, I found myself returning to Camonghne Felix’s reinterpretation of Remarks on Central America and El Salvador at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers.
“We pledge to achieve a just future and stand true to the values of our vital interests.”
That phrasing struck me because it captures something essential about democracy. A pledge is not passive; it asks something of us. It reminds us that democracy is not something we inherit fully formed, but something every generation must actively imagine, shape, and defend.
Given that this is true, artists are not peripheral to democracy.
They are among its essential civic actors.
Something else became very clear to me in Washington through the Center’s inclusion of Art, Imagination, & Narrative as one of its foundational pillars:
- The arts are too often positioned as adjacent to democracy rather than essential to it;
- We underestimate the power of artists to help communities make meaning together;
- We underestimate cultural organizations as civic infrastructure;
- And we underestimate gathering spaces where neighbors can wrestle with difficult questions, imagine different futures, and tell stories about who we are becoming.
Maybe it’s because we continue to think of democracy primarily as a political project. But democracy is also a cultural one. It lives in the stories we inherit, the futures we imagine, and the relationships we build with one another. If democracy is something each generation must claim anew, then imagination is not a luxury, it is civic work.
The lesson I carried home from Howard is this: democracy is built twice. First in our imagination. Then in our institutions.
If we hope to build a more just future, artists shouldn’t simply have a seat at the table. They should be helping design it.
