Fine Acts’ Yana Buhrer Tavanier on how hopeful art fosters both empathy & action
Photo by Bret Hartman
Yana Buhrer Tavanier is the cofounder of Fine Acts, a nonprofit that brings together activists, artists, and techies from across the globe to collaborate on creative projects for social impact, including an open source library with reusable art for justice campaigns globally. In addition to her work with Fine Acts, Yana is a TED Senior Fellow, a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She recently spoke with Toward Belonging’s Sara Grossman about the unique power of art and culture to politically engage people across borders and cultures.
Hi Yana, could you start by sharing a little about Fine Acts? What power do you believe that art has in particular to stimulate activism and civic engagement?
Fine Acts is a global nonprofit creative studio for social impact. We see ourselves as a playground for social change, and we practice playtivism—our concept that refers to the value of multidisciplinary play and experimentation in activism.
In our work, we think about ways to make people care and act, and we create novel avenues to empower activism. Science reports that facts contradicting our convictions are usually met with resistance—in order to convince, one needs to tap into emotions. Art is one of the most powerful tools to translate complex messages into a language that is heard with the soul and understood with the heart.
So, we bring together activists and artists from across the globe to work on collaborative projects. We produce art that raises awareness, triggers action, and fosters greater support for human rights campaigns.
We design and apply novel formats to explore the intersection of human rights, art and technology. And, we craft creative campaigns for amazing nonprofits from around the world. We’ve done campaigns and creative interventions on domestic violence, climate change, fake news, dictatorships, racism, amongst many others.
“Hold Each Other” by Osheen Siva, available for reuse in the Reimagining Human Rights collection
Why did you decide to focus on creating libraries with reusable/adaptable art for social change campaigners? Are there challenges or issues with the ways campaigners use imagery currently that you’re looking to address?
Apart from art and play, we also believe in hope and openness. TheGreats.co is our unique online platform that offers free, hopeful, socially engaged illustrations, designed for activists and nonprofits to use or adapt non-commercially.
Powerful visual content fosters empathy and pushes engagement—however, NGOs and activists often lack the skills and resources to produce or commission it, or the visual culture to select and use truly effective works. The Greats is created to solve these problems. Launched in 2020, the platform already features about a thousand (and growing, fast) open-license works by over 300 artists from around the world, on topics ranging from women’s rights, LGBT+ rights, racial justice, freedom of expression, and many more.
High-quality and impactful visuals are often either difficult to find for free, or do not allow adaptations. Our platform is without analogue – as all illustrations are published under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) allowing free use AND adaptation. For all works, we publish the work files, on top of the print files, so that nonprofits, grassroots organisations and activists globally can use and adapt them according to the needs of their campaigns and communications. This means one can translate the copy or change it completely, change colours, add elements, etc. The illustrations have already been used hundreds of times by big and small organizations, including the UN Human Rights Council, Oxfam, Amnesty International, and Creative Commons.
“Woman With Flowers — Love” by Aleea Rae Campbell, available for reuse in the Black Lives Matter collection
Our leading premise is that art is a powerful tool to translate complex issues in a language that provokes empathy and understanding. By opening these works to the world, and by allowing adaptation and implementation in local contexts, we multiply their impact exponentially. What is more, we promote and foster openness in the visual arts sector, where the practice of licensing works under Creative Commons is low.
Most of the content on The Greats is commissioned by us at Fine Acts, through one of our creative challenges - like Spring of Hope (on hope, solidarity and resilience), 12/24 (on racial injustice and systemic anti-Black racism), and Reimagining Human Rights (where art helps us imagine new narratives and illustrates the future we strive for). On top of that, many artists have decided to open up some of their existing works, to support the work of activists worldwide. The platform allows artists to directly upload for free use and adaptation previously created socially engaged works. The uploaded works then undergo careful selection and curation – we are looking for quality, diversity of voices and styles, and expected impact.
Furthermore, we are always looking for hope. Today, human rights communication often relies on edifying, dark or aggressive tones that do not connect on a human level by provoking empathy or empowerment. As our friends at hope-based comms say, to make the case for human rights, we need to offer the hope of a brighter future. When we only show the abuses, people start to believe that we live in a world of crisis with no alternative. To this end, at The Greats we are building the largest collection of free hopeful visual content around human rights.
Last but not least, together with hope-based comms we just published Seeing Hope: A Visual Messaging Guide for Human Rights, to help organizations use visuals strategically to reinforce narratives that build support for human rights.
“Solidarity Power” by Tom Pritchard, avilable for reuse from the Culture of Solidarity campaign.
The ongoing Culture of Solidarity campaign commissioned artists from different EU countries to produce compelling visuals that bring to life a common vision for a better future. Why now, during the Covid-19 pandemic? What are the opportunities and risks for the EU during this time?
The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the danger of increasing nationalist sentiments, growing authoritarianism, closing borders, and crackdown on civil liberties. However, we also believe that the current crisis can be a strong catalyst for the European idea, as it reveals the fundamental necessity for collective action, unity, and a culture and practice of solidarity. So we see an urgent need for uplifting messages of unity, togetherness and solidarity that would reinforce the feeling of belonging and the idea of Europe as a shared space.
What were the key messages or narratives around solidarity that the artists who participated in this challenge put forth? How are these narratives different from other narratives circulating during this crisis moment?
For Culture of Solidarity, we commissioned 27 artists (one representing each EU member state), and we also issued a call to the European creative community to open up existing works. The illustrations that we selected brought to life European values – like respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law; they addressed building connections and alliances across nations, borders and differences; they showed solidarity as the key element for keeping Europe an open and shared public space for everyone.
Many current narratives simply reflect the direness of a situation – dark and depressing images or statements of what the world is now, or ‘it what it is’. In this context, we are more interested in ‘what it could be’, and how we can get there.
“Support Is Everything” by Ipsita Divedi, available for reuse in the Reimagining Human Rights collection
Do you have a few favorite works of art from recent commissions or projects that you can share? Why are they your favorites?
It is really hard to pick favorites when one is in the business of collaborating with hundreds of amazing artists each year. From the pieces that we’ve commissioned recently, works I absolutely love that spring to mind are this one by Ed Dingli (for Culture of Solidarity), this one by Rozalina Burkova (for Spring of Hope), this one by Nebojša Cvetković (for Reimagining Human Rights), this one by Lee Mokobe.
As with all pieces I love, these are all powerful works that speak volumes and inspire. They depict a hopeful view of the world that can be. They are universal, evergreen and often playful, and speak to our shared humanity in ways that makes them relevant to people in different countries, languages and contexts.