How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves

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 o...