The Courage to Listen: Art, Dialogue, and Bridging Divides
A political conversation does not have to begin with persuasion. It can begin with a question, a stranger, and the willingness to listen.
In this conversation with Danise Sugita on Voices That Propel Us, I talk about what happened when I stopped making art from a distance and started making it in the presence of other people. Triptych Dialogue grew out of a realization that putting political ideas into the world without engaging the people who encounter them was no longer enough. I wanted to know what might happen if I stood there and listened.
That led me into National Parks, public spaces, protests, and encounters with strangers who held views very different from mine. I asked people three non-confrontational questions about American politics. Then I listened.
What surprised me was not that people disagreed. It was how often disagreement could coexist with recognition. Anger, frustration, fear, hope, and uncertainty became places where a conversation could begin.
We also talk about algorithms, echo chambers, art, storytelling, the courage required to remain silent, and why a single conversation can become a small act of political participation.
Key Takeaways
Triptych Dialogue changed when I moved from making political art at a distance to meeting people face-to-face and listening to them.
Conversations with strangers revealed that political disagreement does not necessarily prevent human connection. Emotional common ground can sometimes appear even when facts and opinions remain different.
Art can create an indirect way into difficult subjects. A glass case, two empty chairs, or a repurposed book can raise a question without telling someone what they are supposed to think.
Algorithms can reinforce the boundaries of our existing social and political worlds. Stepping outside those boundaries requires deliberately finding places where different people actually encounter one another.
The three non-confrontational political questions I use are less about changing someone's mind than creating a space where someone can speak and another person can listen.
Small actions matter because they become stories. A conversation, an act of kindness, or an unexpected encounter can travel from one person to another without being measured by likes, followers, or other digital metrics.
Detailed Exploration
I stopped making political art from a distance
For a long time, I approached art as a political activist. I would make the work, put it out there, and essentially say: here it is. You can look at it, like it, dislike it, or ignore it.
After January 6 and the political turmoil around that period, something changed for me. I started thinking that our communities could fall apart if we couldn't find ways to connect with one another in person.
So I stopped being an anonymous artist.
That sounds simple, but it changed the nature of the work. Instead of putting an artwork into the world and walking away, I began standing beside it. I became part of the encounter.
And something unexpected happened to me. There was less anger in my life.
I had been making political work from a place of anger and urgency. I still had political views, and those views didn't disappear. What changed was my relationship to the people who held different views.
That became the beginning of Triptych Dialogue as I know it now.
Traveling through other people's echo chambers
I grew up in France and later moved to the United States, so I've spent much of my life between two cultures. Even as a kid, I was interested in how differently the same world could be described.
I remember listening to shortwave radio in Paris. I could hear broadcasts from the Soviet Union and Voice of America. Sometimes they were talking about the same events, but the stories sounded completely different.
That experience stayed with me.
It made me curious about the spaces we inhabit intellectually and politically. We all have some kind of echo chamber. The interesting question isn't necessarily how to get inside someone else's head. We shouldn't try to do that.
The interesting question is whether we can recognize that the chamber exists.
I've come to think of talking with strangers as a kind of travel. You can travel around the world, but there are also enormous worlds inside your own neighborhood.
Why I went back to talking with strangers
Before Triptych Dialogue became primarily an in-person project, I experimented with Instagram for a year.
Every day I posted an abstract video related to misinformation, disinformation, political polarization, and Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I also deliberately entered political spaces that were very different from my own.
I wanted to see what would happen.
What happened was that the platform kept reinforcing the very divisions I was trying to explore. I encountered hostility, and I experienced restrictions on my account. At the end of the year, I found myself surrounded by thousands of artists even though I hadn't set out to build an artist community.
The algorithm had done its job.
It had figured out where I belonged and helped keep me there.
That was one of the reasons I decided I had to go in person.
Online, I felt as though the architecture itself was making it difficult to encounter people outside my existing world. In person, there was at least a possibility of interrupting that pattern.
So I started going to National Parks and setting up art installations in free-speech areas.
Then I would ask strangers about politics.
The courage required to shut up
I didn't expect active listening to be difficult.
At first, when someone said something I believed was factually wrong, I wanted to correct them. I had to learn to separate the impulse to respond from the decision to listen.
That took practice.
Sometimes someone would express an extremely right-wing political position or use language that was deliberately provocative. My instinct was to react.
Instead, I began looking for the emotion underneath what they were saying.
Someone might be angry. Someone might be frustrated. Someone might be worried about the state of the country.
I could say, essentially, I disagree with what you're saying, but I'm frustrated too.
That became a bridge.
And something still surprises me. Across hundreds of encounters, I haven't experienced the confrontation I expected.
I was prepared for a fight.
Instead, I found myself listening.
Where do these conversations actually happen?
One of the problems is physical.
Where do we encounter people who aren't already part of our social groups?
We have friends. We have families. We have churches. We have workplaces where political conversations may be discouraged. And then we have social media, where algorithms can reinforce existing communities.
But where is the physical place where two people who disagree actually meet?
That's part of what the art installations are doing.
They create a reason for the conversation to happen.
The artwork becomes a kind of invitation.
I don't have to walk up to someone and announce that I want to debate politics. The artwork creates curiosity. The person asks a question. We have something to talk about.
Then I can ask the three questions.
And I can listen.
Art as a way into difficult conversations
I don't think art has to explain everything.
Sometimes an artwork can simply create an opening.
I've used two empty chairs, for example. One chair might have "Democrat" on it and another "Republican." Sometimes people immediately understand the idea: the chairs are empty because the people aren't talking to one another.
Other people see the chairs and think, maybe I should sit down.
That's the possibility I'm interested in.
I've also used repurposed books and other objects. The installations don't all say the same thing in the same way. They're different entry points into the same larger question: how do we get outside our bubbles?
Art can sometimes offer an immediate moment of recognition. You don't need a long explanation or a miniature course in political polarization.
Sometimes an image simply makes you stop and think:
Oh. I hadn't looked at it that way.
And maybe that's enough to make the next step possible.
The Grand Canyon and the glass box
One of the encounters that stays with me happened at the Grand Canyon.
I had a simple museum-style stand with a glass case. Inside the case was an abstract object.
People would come up and ask what it was.
I'd explain that I wasn't really interested in the object. I was interested in the glass around it.
The plexiglass represented our point of view, our worldview, our echo chamber.
When we're inside our own box, our view can seem enormous.
But the box is actually much smaller than we think.
I also used a glass jar containing a small object. I would ask: How does this person in here speak to that person in there? How do you enter another person's box?
Usually there would be a moment of silence.
That silence was important.
Nothing had been resolved. Nobody had suddenly changed political parties. There was no conclusion I could point to.
But something was happening.
I could see people thinking.
For me, those moments of silence are part of listening too.
Stories travel farther than we do
One thing I've learned is that people carry stories.
Someone sees an installation at the Grand Canyon and later tells another person about the strange conversation they had there.
Someone finds one of my repurposed books.
Someone hears about the three questions.
Someone else tries them.
That's difficult to measure.
There is no obvious metric for it.
You can't necessarily count it in likes or followers.
I've met people who have recognized the project even though I don't maintain the kind of social media presence that would normally create that visibility.
A story had traveled.
That interests me much more than a metric.
What happens when we stop trying to win?
The goal isn't to convince someone.
I don't need to make someone agree with me.
I've become increasingly interested in something much simpler: can we recognize each other as human beings even when we disagree?
That's different from agreeing to disagree.
It's more basic.
I see you.
Do you see me?
That can be enough to begin.
For me, this was a major change. My political views didn't disappear. What changed was my view of other people.
They stopped being "others."
They became part of "us."
That doesn't mean everyone agrees. It means we don't have to live permanently in separate rooms with the doors closed.
A small foundation can still be a strong one
I'm not especially interested in predicting what Triptych Dialogue will become.
I'm more interested in the small events that happen along the way.
I once dropped one of the repurposed books somewhere in Utah. Later, at a volunteer trail-maintenance camp, someone told me they had seen one of the books on a friend's coffee table and that they had talked about the questions.
Another time, in Santa Fe, someone recognized the project and told me they had heard about it.
Those moments matter because they tell me something has moved beyond the original encounter.
I think of these small actions as a foundation.
A conversation is a small action.
Listening is a small action.
Picking up trash when nobody is watching is a small action.
The point isn't always that someone knows you did it.
The point is that you did it.
We are all artists
At one point in the conversation, I suggested that art is much broader than what we normally call art.
If you're acting with intention, you're creating something.
We're all artists in that sense.
Even a simple action can become an artistic or political act because it expresses something about how we choose to participate in the world.
That also means art doesn't have to look political.
My abstract paintings may contain no political slogan, but they still carry my energy and my perspective.
And presence matters here too.
We tend to photograph the beautiful sunset rather than simply experience the sunset.
The image is on the phone.
But the sunset is right there.
Being present in that moment is part of what I think we need to recover in our relationships with one another.
The three questions
The most practical part of Triptych Dialogue is also the simplest.
I ask three non-confrontational political questions:
How would you describe the political system of the United States of America?
Describe your feelings or reactions to the current state of U.S. politics.
Politics in the United States...
The third question is intentionally unfinished.
The person completes the sentence.
Then I ask for one word that brings their answers together.
The word can be surprising.
Someone may spend several minutes expressing anger, frustration, or uncertainty and then choose a word connected to hope.
The important thing is that I don't tell them what their answer should be.
I listen.
And I ask them to listen to themselves.
Practice before you cross the biggest divide
I don't recommend beginning with the most difficult person in your life.
Start somewhere easier.
Practice with someone you already know and trust.
Think of it almost like a play. You're an actor. You're rehearsing.
Then try it with a stranger.
Eventually, perhaps you can have the conversation with a family member or former friend with whom political disagreement has created distance.
The objective still isn't persuasion.
It's recognition.
You may discover that you disagree about facts and opinions while sharing an emotion, a concern, or a hope.
That shared emotion can become a bridge.
The question behind the questions
The larger question for me is very simple:
What does my echo chamber look like?
And then:
What happens if I go see somebody else's?
That doesn't mean abandoning your beliefs. It doesn't mean pretending that differences don't matter.
It means becoming curious about the person who lives somewhere else inside the larger political landscape.
The strange thing I've discovered is that listening can feel much more dangerous in anticipation than it actually is in practice.
I've repeatedly expected something to go wrong.
It hasn't.
I keep being surprised by how much can happen when you simply listen.
From the Conversation
"I didn't realize how much courage it would take for me to shut up and listen."
"We're not going to agree on the facts and opinions, but there might be one emotion that we share."
"Not agreeing and not agreeing even to disagree is just acknowledging that I see you."
"What's my echo chamber look like? Let's go see somebody else's."
"Little acts. Little acts. Do little stuff. Practice and act. And be present."
Related Triptych Dialogue Projects
Triptych Dialogue :
The larger project behind the conversation, using art and face-to-face encounters to explore how people communicate across political and social differences.
Three Non-Confrontational Political Questions :
The three questions discussed in this episode are the practical foundation of the encounters described here.
Active Listening :
The listening practice that allows the questions to become conversations rather than debates.
National Park Art Installations:
The public installations where many of these encounters took place, including the Grand Canyon.
Views From the Cave:
A related exploration of echo chambers, perception, and the difficulty of seeing beyond the boundaries of our own point of view.
FAQ
Is Triptych Dialogue about changing people's political opinions?
No. The conversation makes a distinction between persuasion and recognition. The purpose of the encounters is not to make people agree, but to create a situation where people with different views can listen to one another and recognize a shared humanity.
What are the three non-confrontational political questions?
The questions ask people to describe the U.S. political system, describe their feelings or reactions to the current state of U.S. politics, and complete the sentence "Politics in the United States..." The questions are followed by a request for one word that brings the responses together.
Why does Triptych Dialogue use strangers?
David describes strangers as a useful place to practice because there is less emotional history involved than with family members or close friends. The conversation suggests beginning with people who feel relatively safe before attempting more difficult conversations with people close to us.
What role does art play in political dialogue?
The artwork provides an indirect entry point. Rather than beginning with an argument, an installation or object can create curiosity and give two people something to talk about. The artwork becomes a tool for creating the conditions for dialogue.
Does David believe people should agree with one another?
No. The conversation repeatedly distinguishes connection from agreement. The possibility being explored is whether people can remain connected even when their political opinions and interpretations of facts differ.
About the Host
Danise Sugita is the creator and host of Voices That Propel Us, a podcast focused on justice, action, community, and conversations with people working toward social change; Voices That Propel Us