By Justin Kiczek 

President 

What if I dripped paint onto a canvas on the floor?

What if I tried to write the way people actually think?

What if we played this song, but electric?

These are not idle questions. They are the questions that gave us Jackson Pollock, stream-of-consciousness literature, and rock and roll. “What if” is the question artists have always asked most boldly, most freely — and most often. And it turns out, it may be the most powerful question any of us can ask.

One of the many blessings of place-based philanthropy is the opportunity to see connections and patterns across sectors. Lately, it has been particularly exciting to see how the arts are informing the work of our grantees in other fields — from the quickly growing arts-in-health movement, to the use of song to bridge divides, to the enduring role arts play in education. Moreover, groups like ArtPride New Jersey inform us that the arts are also economic engines, bringing diners, tourists, and culture-seekers to our towns. In fact, that arts don’t often follow business — business follows the arts. Consider, as examples, Morristown’s Mayo Performing Arts Center or the F. M. Kirby Center for the Performing Arts in Wilkes-Barre, PA.

So why is that? Why can art so often lead the way, seeing opportunities where others don’t? 

My answer: artists are the best at asking “what if.” These two words dwell in a world of possibility and potential — a world artists love to inhabit. By their own grammatical logic, any question that begins with “what if” conjures something that is not yet reality but feels, just by the act of being asked, possible.

But artists are not alone in asking it. “What if” is also the lingua franca of inventors and innovators. What if we could make books with a machine rather than by hand? What if we could put a computer in a pocket? What if we could make cars electric? Or, as the F. M. Kirby Foundation’s founder Fred Morgan Kirby once asked: What if we created a store where some products were sold at a low, affordable price to draw customers in for all their shopping needs?

The phone in your pocket, the car you drove this morning, the screen on which you read this — all of them are the realized answers to crude “what if” questions that were asked, then pondered, then scratched out, then iterated upon, and eventually brought into the world.

And entrepreneurs are not limited to the commercial realm. Social entrepreneurs ask the same question. Wendy Kopp asked, “What if we attracted teachers with a two-year commitment?” Scott Harrison asked, “What if we could bring clean water to people all over the world?” Martin Luther King, Jr., asked, “What if we fought for our civil rights through nonviolence and love for the very people who hate us?”

Two simple words. Two words of possibility and potential, ideas and iteration. Two words that almost always point toward something that does not yet exist.

The writer Marilynne Robinson describes imagination as “presence in absence” — the act of bodying forth something where nothing yet exists. What distinguishes artists, I think, is their freedom and fearlessness in asking “what if” again and again, without paralysis, without waiting for permission. But this power is available to all of us. You don’t need to be Jackson Pollock or Toni Morrison or Frank Lloyd Wright to ask it. The strongest organizations I encounter are the ones where people at every level feel free to ask: What if we launched this new program? What if we partnered with that organization? What if we tried this another way?

That said, the question is only the beginning. The real courage comes in answering it. Imagine if Shakespeare asked, What if a group of travelers found themselves stranded on an island with a magician? and never wrote The Tempest. Imagine if Picasso asked, What if I could capture the chaos of war in a single canvas? and never painted Guernica. How impoverished we would be if artists never answered these questions.

This is what strikes me as so unique about the arts — and arts in the community, in particular. For some funders, the arts can feel like a luxury, less urgent than food security or climate change or disease. But consider this: it is common to hear the leader of a food bank or a domestic violence shelter say, “We are working to put ourselves out of business.” Any of us would celebrate those closures if it meant they were no longer necessary. But what does it tell you that we would be aghast to hear the leader of an arts institution say the same thing? Arts organizations cannot work to put themselves out of business — because we never stop turning to them for answers to the deepest questions of what it means to be human, in this era and in every era before it.

So, this is my song of praise for those who don’t just ask “what if,” but answer with an act of creation. Those who put the first word on the page, the first note on the sheet, the first stroke of the brush. Those who, when they were done, created a presence where there was once only absence.

At the F. M. Kirby Foundation, we are fortunate to have so many artists, innovators, and entrepreneurs in the communities we support who ask those “what if” questions — and answer them with courage and creativity. But the world needs more. It needs all of us to keep asking, to keep imagining, to keep creating presence where there is now absence. Because every great work of art, every act of change, every small tweak to how we do things begins with two simple words:

What if.