Sarah Lewis, Founder of Vision & Justice, Harvard Associate Professor and Bestselling Author of The Rise and The Unseen Truth.
"The Rise - Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery"
Sarah's keynote will be followed by Q&A and Book Signing. "The Rise" and "Unseen Truth" can be purchased at the Westcott Shop. You can make a purchase through our online store or onsite at 85 South Greenmount Avenue, Tuesday through Sunday, 10am-5pm).
Where do new ideas spring from? What really drives iconic, transformational change on both a personal and an organizational level? From Nobel Prize-winning discoveries to works of art, many of our creative triumphs are not achievements but conversions, argues Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, author of The Rise. And when we fail, that’s when we know we’re on the road to success.
Sarah draws on figures such as abolitionist Frederick Douglass and grit pioneer Angela Duckworth, revealing the importance of play, grit, surrender, often ignored ideas, and the necessary experiments and follow-up attempts that lead to true breakthroughs. Uplifting and counterintuitive, this keynote will equip you to harness failure, tap into your creative potential, and seek radical innovation in your personal and professional life. The path to success, Sarah notes, is often more surprising than we expect.
Questions? Email info@westcotthouse.org.
Interested in discussing the book prior to the event? Join our inaugural Westcott Book Club meeting on November 5th at 5:30pm.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Sarah is the founder of Vision & Justice, a catalytic civic initiative that generates original research and programs that reveal the foundational role of visual culture in America’s representational democracy. At Harvard, she pioneered the course Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which she continues to teach and which is now part of the university’s core curriculum.
Her latest book, The Unseen Truth (an Amazon bestseller), reveals one of the greatest lies we’ve been told about race in this country, and how we can move past it. She tells the story of the Caucasian war—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the U.S. Civil War—and how it showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness actually wasn’t white at all. She shows how visual tactics concealed the truth in order to secure our regime of racial injustice, and how we can begin to see what we have ignored and start to dismantle this regime. Harvard professor Imani Perry says that she “illuminates what it means to both ‘see’ and create race, deepening our ability to pursue justice.”
She is also the bestselling author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, a story-driven investigation into a biography of an idea—a big idea—that no current term yet captures. It reveals the secrets behind creative human endeavor, and how innovation, mastery, and new concepts are found in unlikely places. The New York Times writes that “Lewis’s voice is so lyrical and engaging that her book, The Rise, can be read in one sitting,” while Junot Diaz praises it as “exhilarating, inspiring, profound and so beautifully written it left me breathless.” It has been translated into six languages to date.
Sarah’s talks urgently address the world we are living in right now, gathering various threads—art history, technical innovation, race, photography, the story of America, and her own deeply personal narrative—to elucidate the power of art to ignite transformative social change. This combination of urgency, hope, and clear, compelling analysis keeps her lecture halls packed; it’s the reason her award-winning “Vision and Justice” issue of Aperture Magazine (now in its fourth printing) and bestselling book The Unseen Truth have garnered unprecedented press coverage and changed the national conversation on race. Clint Smith, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed, says that “it is almost as if Sarah Lewis has given us a new pair of glasses that allow us to see history in ways that were previously unclear. Lewis has provided us with an indispensable resource to better see ourselves.”
Sarah has spoken to top-tier organizations from Prada to ABC to United Way. She has also spoken at the UN General Assembly for the 60th anniversary of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Her mainstage TED talk received over 3 million views and she was a closing speaker at SXSW. She was prominently featured in HBO’s Black Art: In the Absence of Light, a “rich and absorbing” documentary exploring two centuries of art by African-Americans, and the path they forged for contemporary Black artists. Sarah’s scholarship has also been profiled by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, to name a few. She was on Oprah’s “Power List,” served on President Obama’s Arts Policy Committee, and was the inaugural recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The award honors Lewis for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African-Americans.”
She is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and focuses on visual representation, racial justice, and representational democracy in the United States. Her forthcoming book, Vision & Justice, will be published with One World/Random House in 2026.
