About the Initiative
Vision & Justice, founded by Sarah Lewis at Harvard University, is an award-winning initiative that generates original research, curricula, and programs that reveal the foundational role visual culture in America’s representational democracy.
Through institutional collaborations, leadership convenings, publications, and public programs, Vision & Justice serves as an organizer, partner, and resource for today’s leaders—and those to come—in fostering representational excellence.
“How many movements began when an aesthetic encounter indelibly changed our inherited perceptions of the world?”
— Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
Milestones
The Vision & Justice Convening, a ground-breaking gathering inaugurated in 2019 to bring together prominent thought leaders to examine the role of the arts in understanding the nexus of art, race, and justice. The program for the first event, spanning two days, featured performances by Carrie Mae Weems, Wynton Marsalis, and Amanda Gorman and panel discussions with Ava DuVernay, Chelsea Clinton, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Nicole Fleetwood, Hank Willis Thomas, Bryan Stevenson, and many more.
The Vision & Justice Book Series, co-edited with Leigh Raiford and Deborah Willis. Launched in partnership with Aperture in 2024, its first publication is a collection of essays by Maurice Berger, edited by his husband Marvin Heiferman, Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images.
The 2016 special issue of Aperture magazine was guest edited by Lewis and themed “Vision & Justice.” The issue won the 2017 Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in the Critical Writing and Research Category and was made required reading at NYU Tisch School of the Arts that year. The issue features a range of artistic contributions and voices across disciplines including, Jennifer Blessing, Dawoud Bey, Teju Cole, Awol Erizku, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Thelma Golden, Katori Hall, Margo Jefferson, Deana Lawson, Alicia Hall Moran, Jason Moran, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Nell Irvin Painter, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, Salamishah Tillet, and Bradford Young.
The launch of Project Douglass at Google, inspired by Vision & Justice, to work to eliminate algorithmic bias in smartphone technology.
Harvard University course “Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship” pioneered by Lewis in 2016 and made part of the university’s core curriculum in 2017.
The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, Lewis’ 2014 book, which crystallized her thinking on the mobilizing power of aesthetic experiences.
Like the initiative itself, these key cornerstones take conceptual inspiration from the abolitionist and great nineteenth century thinker Frederick Douglass’ understudied Civil War speech, “Pictures and Progress,” about the transformative power of pictures to create a new vision for the nation. Built upon Douglass' historic scholarship and catalyzed by these contemporary projects, Vision & Justice is at the forefront of representational justice in the U.S.