The Power of the Visual: Contemporary Art as a Tool for Advocacy & What We Can Carry Into 2026

By Amelie Wu

When considering solutions to our most urgent global challenges, art—and especially contemporary art—may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Yet a closer look reveals that many of today’s artists are harnessing their practices as powerful vehicles for awareness, education, and change. Through their work, they illuminate critical issues such as climate change, social injustice, and collective memory, offering new ways of understanding and engaging with these crises. 

Metabolic Studio, founded and directed by artist Lauren Bon, is a transformative example of an artist research space that explores and addresses critical social and environmental issues. Through art interventions and innovative projects aimed at reparation, the studio makes visible the relationship between humans, land, and living systems. 

Bending the River construction site at Metabolic Studio

Bending the River is an ambitious undertaking by Metabolic Studio designed to remediate water and land around the Los Angeles River. Informed by traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous practice, Bending the River adapts to the concretized infrastructure of the L.A. River, using solar, gravity, and salvaged floodplain to remediate surrounding water and land via a native wetland treatment. Over 75 permits across city, county, state, and federal jurisdictions were acquired for the project, along with the first-ever private water right in the City of Los Angeles. By restoring ecological function to a long-industrialized corridor, Bending the River has the potential to return cleaner water to the city, revitalize surrounding communities, and demonstrate a scalable model for climate resilience in Los Angeles. 

Similar climate-focused efforts have been made on a larger, programmatic approach. On April 23, 2024, the Getty Trust announced the inauguration of the PST ART Climate Impact Program – another ambitious effort to unite climate action across over 70 exhibiting institutions. 

The program commits to building climate fluency among Southern California arts professionals and collects climate impact reports to create a data-driven understanding of the collective climate impact of exhibition-making. This undertaking tests and studies sustainable exhibition practices while building community and collaboration on minimizing environmental impact within the Southern Californian museum field.

Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice at the Hammer Museum

In alliance with the program was the Hammer Museum’s 2024 exhibition, Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice. Featuring over 20 artists and an overt call to action, the exhibition spurs discussion and deconstructs the political polarization around climate injustices. Artworks depicting a gaping black hole, a civilian holding up a sign for free water, and a faux model of what a waterlogged city could look like confront audience members with an array of dystopian realities and threads of hope, prompting viewers to explore this critical challenge and contemplate new perspectives.

On an individual scale, artists often integrate threads from their personal memory, experience, and community to further investigate social problems within intimate narratives. 

Kelly Akashi, a Japanese American artist, employs a range of glass-blowing, casting, candle-making, and stone carving techniques to index fragmented moments in time. Working closely with her hands, body, and memory, Akashi leverages a meditative craft that draws from tradition to reveal hidden histories and reimagine futures.  

Weep (2020) by Kelly Akashi

Weep (2020) is a sculpture and working fountain by Akashi that visualizes the trauma and resilience her family endured as prisoners in the Japanese internment camps during World War II. The very process of creating the work involved Akashi’s own visit to the site her family was held in, the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona, in an attempt to find archival material. Inscribed with heritage and lineage, the sculpture offers a space of release and collective sorrow while also shedding light on the continued challenges faced by Asian Americans alike. As she documents marginalized histories, Akashi gives communities tools to reclaim their narratives, mediating time, remembrance, grief, and resilience.

L.A.-based Patrick Martinez, is another artist with social action inseparable in his work.   

Drawing from observation, literature, and oral histories, Patrick Martinez memorializes activists, movements, and the transience of an ever-changing Los Angeles landscape. His multimedia works reference and honor Latinx visual traditions from East L.A. and beyond, while also weaving in language inspired by protest signs and conversations from his communities that subvert vibrant text into messages of urgency and awareness. 

Battle of the City on Fire (2025) – currently on show at the Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. biennial – is a sculptural installation that incorporates Martinez’s iconic neon and dimensional painting that mirrors the layered mark-marking across Los Angeles’ urban architecture. The wall of cinder blocks, decorated with graffiti inspired by Mayan murals and commercial signage, models a synthesis of everyday iconography found in our city streets and a history of displacement, gentrification, and cultural survival. The artist also brings attention to the East Los Streetscapers, muralists who painted in East L.A. in the 1960s-70s as part of the Chicano Mural Movement. As the cinder blocks refer to the demolition of a mural in Boyle Heights and cycles of destruction and rebuilding, Martinez invites viewers to engage and reflect with the transient movement of Los Angeles at a convergence of the past and present. 

Battle of the City on Fire (2025) by Patrick Martinez

While contemporary art as a whole will not be the precise tool that will save our world, its imaginative approach disseminates and packages stories in a profound way that invites us to consider alternative modes of thinking and approach. The artists and institutions highlighted here show how visual practice can illuminate hidden stories, activate public memory, experiment with ecological repair, and cultivate community dialogue. Their work demonstrates that advocacy is not only policy-driven; it can also be sensory, emotional, and deeply human.

MONUMENTS at MOCA Geffen

As we move into 2026, there is much we can carry forward from these artistic interventions. MONUMENTS, presented at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, is on show through May 2026 and extends the bridge artists, research, policymakers, and local organizations can build to address social justice issues by reflecting on the legacies of post-Civil War America. 

Numerous organizations additionally present expanding opportunities to increase equitable access to arts education. Organizations like P.S. ARTS and Inner City Arts bring holistic arts education to public schools and underserved areas in Los Angeles. Blues to Green is another nonprofit that harnesses music and the arts to center the cultures of the African diaspora and catalyze action for racial and climate justice. Getting involved and familiar with these initiatives can not only incite action, but also unlock new avenues towards transformation. 

Time and time again the arts remind us that change often begins with the ability to envision alternatives. Carrying these lessons into 2026, we have the opportunity to become ever more involved and attuned with the world around us. Reflecting on contemporary art and the arts as a whole, we can approach advocacy not only with analysis, but with creativity…seeing the world not just as it is, but as it could be.