How It Feels to Be Alive

A vital testament to how art makes us who we are--and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives.

Barbara Kruger once defined art as the ability "to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive." Testing that claim, Megan O'Grady takes us on a journey to explore art's intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.

When O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. When she was at the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. When she was a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether she was seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation.

Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made--and often drawing on personal conversations with the artists--O'Grady traces the works' rippling impacts, suggesting sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imagination and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does art offer?

A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to consider all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template for thinking through the knottiest problems in our culture and our selves, and the connections between the two.