Mobilizing Communities Through Art

In this interview, Charles Hua, senior at Harvard College and CID student ambassador, speaks with Xavier Cortada and Adam Roberti. Cortada, a Cuban-American artist, seamlessly works across disciplines to engage communities, urging them to draw upon local experiences and unlock their inherent creativity. Adam Roberti is the executive director of the Xavier Cortada Foundation. Discover how Cortada and Riberti leverage socially engaged art as a powerful tool, creating experiences that educate, inspire, and mobilize communities to collectively combat climate and ecological crises. The conversation delves into the profound impact of art in solving community problems, emphasizing the importance of tapping into the creativity, knowledge, and wisdom of those residing on the front line, offering a unique perspective on how art can be a driving force for change.

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Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work. The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more. At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.