The Noise Outside
When the world grows unbearably loud, the act of creating can feel almost defiant. Every era has its noise, whether political, cultural, or existential, and still, artists have returned to the page, the canvas, and the lens to search for coherence in the chaos.
There are stretches of time when the world grows so loud it feels impossible to think, much less to create. There is an undercurrent of constant tension-news, noise, and seemingly endless suffering. Even silence feels politicized. In these moments, the creative act can seem indulgent and out of step with urgency. And yet, time and again, artists have found their most enduring voice in the midst of chaos. Creativity has always found a way to breathe under pressure.
In Europe in the years leading up to World War II, creation was inseparable from crisis. German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s stark etchings captured the crushing weight of grief before language could name it. Her lines– tender, brutal, and human– stood as a witness to loss in the shadow of war. In Paris, Picasso’s Guernica transformed the horror of the Spanish Civil War into a universally resonant monument to suffering, an image that transcended propaganda through its sheer emotional charge. Around him, the Surrealists—Dalí, Ernst, Tanguy—employed dream logic to capture a world coming apart at its seams. Their art was not escapism, but translation: an attempt to represent a collective psychic rupture when reason no longer sufficed, and no one knew where to turn to make sense of it all.
Decades later, in the thick of the Civil Rights movement, James Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time, holding up a mirror to America as its streets burned. Nina Simone set that same urgency to sound, turning fury and heartbreak into melody. And halfway around the world, in postwar Japan, photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu found intimacy in the ruins, documenting a country in the process of rebuilding its sense of self. The same could be said of artists working through colonial and postcolonial transitions, such as Fela Kuti’s Lagos and Ernest Cole’s South Africa, where sound and image became survival.
What ties these creators together is not simply their response to turmoil, but their insistence on presence within it. To create during unrest is not necessarily to make work about that unrest. Sometimes it means fiercely protecting beauty in a moment that seeks to destroy it. During World War II, Georgia O’Keeffe painted desert horizons that seemed untouched by conflict, yet her restraint was a quiet protest—a belief that attention and beauty still mattered. Toni Morrison once said that “the function of freedom is to free someone else.” Writing, for her, was an act of reclamation, a way of making sense of a world that stubbornly refused coherence.
Even now, artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and El Anatsui extend this lineage, transforming social fracture into something both visual and meditative. Their work reminds us that art is not merely a reaction; it’s a reassembly. It asks us to see, to listen, to slow down in the face of the relentless.
There’s a temptation to believe that creativity requires calm, that inspiration only thrives in peace. But the truth may be the opposite. The artist’s role has always been to listen differently—to capture the pulse of a world racing forward too fast and translate its chaos into something recognizably human. Maybe the challenge now isn’t to block out the noise, but to reframe it.
The world has rarely been quiet. But creation, in its most essential form, is an act of coherence. Whether in etching, in song, or in the sweep of a brushstroke, art has always found a way to make meaning in the static and to build a moment of stillness inside the storm.
Above: Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child, 1903, Line etching, drypoint, sandpaper, and soft ground with imprint of ribbed laid paper and Ziegler's transfer paper.