Meet Compassionate Houston’s

compassionate artists

Compassionate Houston’s initiative “Compassion Through the Arts” recognizes the Creative Arts as unique and necessary tools for building compassionate communities and strives to inspire and encourage artistic engagement and creative partnerships that cultivate compassion within the Greater Houston community.

Compassion Through the Arts

As a creative field where exploration of the personal and universal interact, the arts bring great pleasure and meaning to our lives. They can also serve an important societal function when focused on our shared humanity and the empathy enabled through “standing in another’s shoes.” Compassionate Houston believes that the power of compassionate artists has significant implications for our world. Our project’s intent is to quicken compassion’s ripple effects in Houston and beyond by highlighting and promoting artists and their works that help us all empathically identify with people and situations different from our own.

Background

In August 2021, following showings of our virtual event Compassion Through the Arts, we formed a committee of two of our Board members (Ted Isensee and Pam Lewis) and three esteemed local compassionate artists from the visual, literary, and musical fields to help further refine our vision of highlighting Houston artists expressing compassion at a high level: Robin Davidson, Kenneth Gayle, and Sneha Bhavsar. Meeting for five months, the committee crafted a vision and criteria for nominating qualified compassion-focused artists. Each panelist nominated three or four artists from their own field (visual, literary or musical), and the full committee then carefully reviewed and selected three artists (one from each category) to receive Compassionate Houston’s Artists of the Year awards.

Meet the Artists

Enjoy exploring the posters for all nine artists below, reading about each artist’s background, and their individual take on compassion in the arts. The posters are best viewed in their original size, so please click on each poster to open up a larger view.

artist poster gallery