The promise of change drives creativity everywhere. Those happy with the world and the status quo don’t strive to make things anew, as they’re content with what exists. Yesterday, in New York City, we did what was thought unimaginable for decades by electing an American Muslim democratic socialist mayor who is himself an immigrant and refused to bow down to the conventional attacks that seek to divide us.
Zohran Mamdani ignored the bad-faith players who sought to drag him down into the gutter, where our worst urges pool like sewage, instead choosing to believe that something new was possible, that the public could be trusted to make important decisions, and that at our core we’re all interested in helping one another.
These feelings should be familiar to any creative soul. It’s no surprise that most neighborhoods where artists and the creative community live in New York City voted overwhelmingly for our mayor-elect. Artists know that you only have to do something once to prove to others that the unimaginable is actually very much possible. Or as the Ancient Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote, “How many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?”
That same energy has driven Hyperallergic from day one, where we refuse to believe that what exists defines what is possible, and since our founding, we’ve found allies in our own communities and beyond. Now we find kinship in a new incoming City Hall administration that proves that New York City continues to dream big — very, very big — and we couldn’t be happier.
I don’t think the fact that Mamdani was born to a prominent artist, filmmaker Mira Nair, is a coincidence. Or that he is married to illustrator and ceramicist Rama Duwaji. Art is often the theory of the impossible, a land to which those who dream of our collective freedom immigrate in order to live and breathe without the burden of what has come before. We recognize this space because we live in it daily.
In its profile of the politician’s parents, the Times of India laid out the connection between art and political idealism very clearly:
“In a moment when representation and identity are central in politics and culture, Zohran Mamdani’s ascent to becoming New York’s first Muslim mayor was almost inevitable, as it is rooted in a childhood steeped in cross-continental migration, artful storytelling, and social justice. At the heart of this story is his Indian-American filmmaker mother, whose career in film and activism created a home environment that nurtured both conscience and creativity.”
These lines should ring familiar to those of us who turn our homes, offices, and studios into laboratories of our own creation. Those of us who refuse to lower our expectations for the future, even if we often feel bogged down in the present or burdened by the past.
During an interview in 1983, Joseph Beuys said, “Art, for me, is the science of freedom.” And we, all of us who dream and celebrate today, continue the tradition of linking art to liberation through the art communities we see and foster, while ignoring the noise of luxury commodification and its associated shills that seek to drive us away from their platinum sandboxes.
Today, we woke up to see that dreams can happen, even as nightmares rage on further afield.
Today, we woke up to see that most New Yorkers are not cruel, or heartless, and value the identities of their neighbors, which we see not as limitations but as superpowers that propel us forward in directions we never could’ve imagined.
Today, we woke up and realized that being alive in these times of change is one of the greatest things we can ever experience, and we’re not apologizing for any of it.
Today, we reassert the power to let artists dream, because tomorrow the creativity and art we make in those homes, studios, or workplaces may just encourage someone to take the baton handed to them and run in directions that never occurred to us before.
