In her work as an urban planner and artist, Candy Chang has spent a lot of time in meetings with people who are trying to figure out a community’s needs and how to best fulfill them. But over and over again, she encountered the same problem—the loudest people in the room were the ones who set the agenda. Was there a way, she wondered, to involve more people in the decisions that affect them all?
To answer that question, she began creating “participatory art”—art that engages locals. Over the years, she has erected thousands of public art installations in cities around the world. Her intent initially was to revitalize civic life in these places, but eventually her focus shifted to exploring people’s inner worlds. Our civic life, she learned, is a reflection of our inner life—nourishing one helps nourish the other.
Her latest installation, which she created with her husband, the writer James Reeves, was called “A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful.” On a wall at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, visitors posted handwritten notes describing their fears and wishes. Anyone could participate—there were pieces of vellum paper and markers on a nearby table—and when the exhibit was open in 2018, Chang and Reeves collected over 50,000 responses: “I’m anxious because I’m 80 and afraid of being alone”; “I’m hopeful because my children are making their way in the world”; “I’m anxious because I need to be forgiven.” Chang and Reeves are now working with social scientists to parse the responses and what they tell us about the current cultural and political moment.
“There’s something reassuring,” Chang told me, “to see you are not alone as you try to make sense of your life.”
Chang’s work has always focused on revealing the inscrutable—but in the beginning, the projects were more practical than emotional. As the child of immigrants from Taiwan, she often had to help her parents navigate the processes of daily life, like filling out forms or understanding parking signs. As an adult, she realized that a lot of this information was readily available, but in a way that made it difficult to understand. One of her first projects was creating a guide for New York City’s street vendors, many of them immigrants, who were getting slapped with hefty fines for violating the rules. With the Center for Urban Pedagogy and the Street Vendor Project, she designed a pamphlet that used illustrations to explain the byzantine regulations and distributed them for free throughout the city.
A few years later, when she was living in New Orleans, another civic problem captured her imagination—and this led to her first major experiment with participatory art. The city was full of vacant houses and storefronts and she was curious what her neighbors thought of them. So she printed hundreds of stickers that said “I wish this was” on them and posted them on about 40 abandoned buildings for people to fill out. The response was explosive. Some of the buildings had hundreds of entries on them—people wanted butcher shops and grocery stores, park spaces and churches. One entry on a dilapidated building said “I wish this was not so scary looking.” The stickers became a way for community members to talk to one another. Someone wrote “I wish this was a bakery” and another person, on the same sticker, added, “If you can get the financing… I will do the baking!!!”
Clearly, people were interested in civic engagement—the question was how to mobilize them. Inspired by “I wish this was,” Chang and two of her friends, Dan and Tee Parham, started a website called Neighborland in 2011, an online platform that gets locals talking to one another about ways to improve their communities. A virtual town hall, people from around the country can post projects or questions—like how to make a certain neighborhood safer or where a city should build bike lanes—and locals respond and work together to take action. Conversations on Neighborland have led to blight improvement projects, food truck regulation reforms, and night markets in cities around the country.
Chang was just beginning to see how art can nurture civic life when she suddenly and unexpectedly lost one of her closest friends, a woman named Joan who was like a mother to her. Chang was inconsolable, her grief and depression unbearable. Religion had never been part of her life, and its absence suddenly felt like a hole. She wanted the reassurance of its rituals, the support of its community. She realized that in an increasingly secular world, many people are left to confront life’s tragedies without any “infrastructure for the soul,” as she puts it. Her grief, she said, felt “like a splatter painting”—pure chaos.
“My inner world,” Chang said, “didn’t feel like it belonged outside at all.”
Wandering the streets of New Orleans in an emotional daze, Chang thought a lot about Joan’s unmet aspirations and how our culture doesn’t encourage open reflection about meaning and death—the things that really matter. Then one day, Chang passed by an abandoned building near her home, which was covered in graffiti. The building looked like it needed some love. So with permission from the property owner and the City, she got her supplies and painted one side of it black and stenciled the words “Before I die ____” on its facade in rows. She left some chalk out and then went home. When she came back the next day, the wall was filled with entries. “Before I die I want to tell my mother I love her.” “Before I die I want to have a student come back and tell me it mattered.” “Before I die I want to help Jaiylin learn how to read.” Creating the wall not only helped her process her grief, but transformed a neighborhood eyesore into a communal space for self-examination. There have now been over 4,000 “Before I die” walls in over 70 countries around the world.
Chang’s early work focused on making basic information more available to others. But after Joan’s death, it was people’s inner lives she wanted to reveal. Her next project, “Confessions,” debuted in the city of sin in 2012, and was inspired by Japanese Shinto shrine prayer walls and Catholicism. In a luxury hotel on the Las Vegas strip—a place where people usually gather to party, gamble, and screw—she set up several confessional booths for people to anonymously write down their secrets on wooden plaques that she arranged on the walls of the hotel’s gallery. One wrote “I sold heroin to my friend and it ruined his life.” Another admitted he still loved his ex-girlfriend after five years apart. Someone in the military revealed he was afraid of dying. “I don’t know what I am doing and I’m running out of time,” wrote another.
Her newest projects seek to help people move from confession to catharsis and communion. In 2016, “The Atlas of Tomorrow” opened as a permanent mural in downtown Philadelphia. The Atlas invites visitors to reflect on a dilemma in their lives—and then to spin a wheel that points them toward one of the 64 fables that appear on the wall. Written by Reeves, the stories are inspired by the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text that offers practical wisdom. “The Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful” also involves visitors in a ritual. At the Rubin museum, people silently write down their entries, hang them on the wall, and step back to read the others. Their phones are away; the atmosphere is solemn.
Chang wants more public spaces that encourage spiritual and philosophical reflection—fewer ones that distract and degrade with ads. “I am part of a growing population that isn’t religious but yearns for spirituality,” she says. “I think there’s a big opportunity to reimagine what a secular spirituality can look like and how communities can nurture our psychological lives.”
Not only would such spaces give people an opportunity to connect with something higher and deeper than they ordinarily experience in the grind of daily life, but they also foster empathy. In a world that feels increasingly divided, where people are quick to judge, resent, and hate, Chang’s work is a reminder of our common humanity, that we’re all just trying to get by—an important civics lesson for our time.
In her work as an urban planner and artist, Candy Chang has spent a lot of time in meetings with people who are trying to figure out a community’s needs and how to best fulfill them. But over and over again, she encountered the same problem—the loudest people in the room were the ones who set the agenda. Was there a way, she wondered, to involve more people in the decisions that affect them all?
To answer that question, she began creating “participatory art”—art that engages locals. Over the years, she has erected thousands of public art installations in cities around the world. Her intent initially was to revitalize civic life in these places, but eventually her focus shifted to exploring people’s inner worlds. Our civic life, she learned, is a reflection of our inner life—nourishing one helps nourish the other.
Her latest installation, which she created with her husband, the writer James Reeves, was called “A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful.” On a wall at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, visitors posted handwritten notes describing their fears and wishes. Anyone could participate—there were pieces of vellum paper and markers on a nearby table—and when the exhibit was open in 2018, Chang and Reeves collected over 50,000 responses: “I’m anxious because I’m 80 and afraid of being alone”; “I’m hopeful because my children are making their way in the world”; “I’m anxious because I need to be forgiven.” Chang and Reeves are now working with social scientists to parse the responses and what they tell us about the current cultural and political moment.
“There’s something reassuring,” Chang told me, “to see you are not alone as you try to make sense of your life.”
Chang’s work has always focused on revealing the inscrutable—but in the beginning, the projects were more practical than emotional. As the child of immigrants from Taiwan, she often had to help her parents navigate the processes of daily life, like filling out forms or understanding parking signs. As an adult, she realized that a lot of this information was readily available, but in a way that made it difficult to understand. One of her first projects was creating a guide for New York City’s street vendors, many of them immigrants, who were getting slapped with hefty fines for violating the rules. With the Center for Urban Pedagogy and the Street Vendor Project, she designed a pamphlet that used illustrations to explain the byzantine regulations and distributed them for free throughout the city.
A few years later, when she was living in New Orleans, another civic problem captured her imagination—and this led to her first major experiment with participatory art. The city was full of vacant houses and storefronts and she was curious what her neighbors thought of them. So she printed hundreds of stickers that said “I wish this was” on them and posted them on about 40 abandoned buildings for people to fill out. The response was explosive. Some of the buildings had hundreds of entries on them—people wanted butcher shops and grocery stores, park spaces and churches. One entry on a dilapidated building said “I wish this was not so scary looking.” The stickers became a way for community members to talk to one another. Someone wrote “I wish this was a bakery” and another person, on the same sticker, added, “If you can get the financing… I will do the baking!!!”
Clearly, people were interested in civic engagement—the question was how to mobilize them. Inspired by “I wish this was,” Chang and two of her friends, Dan and Tee Parham, started a website called Neighborland in 2011, an online platform that gets locals talking to one another about ways to improve their communities. A virtual town hall, people from around the country can post projects or questions—like how to make a certain neighborhood safer or where a city should build bike lanes—and locals respond and work together to take action. Conversations on Neighborland have led to blight improvement projects, food truck regulation reforms, and night markets in cities around the country.
Chang was just beginning to see how art can nurture civic life when she suddenly and unexpectedly lost one of her closest friends, a woman named Joan who was like a mother to her. Chang was inconsolable, her grief and depression unbearable. Religion had never been part of her life, and its absence suddenly felt like a hole. She wanted the reassurance of its rituals, the support of its community. She realized that in an increasingly secular world, many people are left to confront life’s tragedies without any “infrastructure for the soul,” as she puts it. Her grief, she said, felt “like a splatter painting”—pure chaos.
“My inner world,” Chang said, “didn’t feel like it belonged outside at all.”
Wandering the streets of New Orleans in an emotional daze, Chang thought a lot about Joan’s unmet aspirations and how our culture doesn’t encourage open reflection about meaning and death—the things that really matter. Then one day, Chang passed by an abandoned building near her home, which was covered in graffiti. The building looked like it needed some love. So with permission from the property owner and the City, she got her supplies and painted one side of it black and stenciled the words “Before I die ____” on its facade in rows. She left some chalk out and then went home. When she came back the next day, the wall was filled with entries. “Before I die I want to tell my mother I love her.” “Before I die I want to have a student come back and tell me it mattered.” “Before I die I want to help Jaiylin learn how to read.” Creating the wall not only helped her process her grief, but transformed a neighborhood eyesore into a communal space for self-examination. There have now been over 4,000 “Before I die” walls in over 70 countries around the world.
Chang’s early work focused on making basic information more available to others. But after Joan’s death, it was people’s inner lives she wanted to reveal. Her next project, “Confessions,” debuted in the city of sin in 2012, and was inspired by Japanese Shinto shrine prayer walls and Catholicism. In a luxury hotel on the Las Vegas strip—a place where people usually gather to party, gamble, and screw—she set up several confessional booths for people to anonymously write down their secrets on wooden plaques that she arranged on the walls of the hotel’s gallery. One wrote “I sold heroin to my friend and it ruined his life.” Another admitted he still loved his ex-girlfriend after five years apart. Someone in the military revealed he was afraid of dying. “I don’t know what I am doing and I’m running out of time,” wrote another.
Her newest projects seek to help people move from confession to catharsis and communion. In 2016, “The Atlas of Tomorrow” opened as a permanent mural in downtown Philadelphia. The Atlas invites visitors to reflect on a dilemma in their lives—and then to spin a wheel that points them toward one of the 64 fables that appear on the wall. Written by Reeves, the stories are inspired by the I Ching, an ancient Chinese text that offers practical wisdom. “The Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful” also involves visitors in a ritual. At the Rubin museum, people silently write down their entries, hang them on the wall, and step back to read the others. Their phones are away; the atmosphere is solemn.
Chang wants more public spaces that encourage spiritual and philosophical reflection—fewer ones that distract and degrade with ads. “I am part of a growing population that isn’t religious but yearns for spirituality,” she says. “I think there’s a big opportunity to reimagine what a secular spirituality can look like and how communities can nurture our psychological lives.”
Not only would such spaces give people an opportunity to connect with something higher and deeper than they ordinarily experience in the grind of daily life, but they also foster empathy. In a world that feels increasingly divided, where people are quick to judge, resent, and hate, Chang’s work is a reminder of our common humanity, that we’re all just trying to get by—an important civics lesson for our time.
