From Anxiety to Agency

In our Creative Leadership community, we lean into stories that widen our imagination. One recent contribution from the Creative Leadership Field Guide stands out: Encouraging Climate Literacy Through the Visual Arts, written by MACL alumni, Mary Anne Redding. this essay asks: How can art help us reinvent a sustainable world? It offers a courageous answer: by turning anxiety into agency, inviting people into questions, practices, and collective hope.

Redding’s work at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts draws directly from her experience in MCAD’s MA in Creative Leadership courses like Leading Transformational Change and Designing for Complexity and Social Impact inform how she curates exhibitions that are educational, provocative, and offer sanctuary all at once.

The essay states that visual art doesn’t need to just reflect the climate crisis, it can provoke learning, connection, and ownership. Redding describes her curatorial mission as shifting from anxiety (the paralyzing weight of climate fear) to agency (the impulse to act). She emphasizes that the language we use matters: we must frame climate narratives not in doom, but in possibility, hope, and improved futures.

In practice, that means centering historically excluded voices, integrating disability justice into gallery operations, and weaving inclusive policies into hiring and programming. These are not surface gestures, they are structural choices that reflect values in action.

Redding’s process also models distributed leadership—rotating responsibilities among the exhibitions team, building shared reading lists, and inviting everyone to choose readings or lead discussions. This approach helps build psychological safety, collective ownership, and a more inclusive approach to curatorial work.

Within the broader Creative Leadership Field Guide, this essay stands as a powerful reminder: creative leadership is not just about producing art. It’s about how we design the systems, spaces, and practices around that art so that it can carry healing, connection, and transformation.