Art is a powerful thing.  Besides moving us, our hearts, senses, and imaginations, it moves culture, potentially transforming a people, even a nation.  I thought anew about this when the other day I realized that roughly ten years had passed since the passing of the Russian born artist Boris Lurie.
     Lurie is most famous for developing what has come to be called NO!Art.  What's NO!Art?  It is art as social protest.  And not just conventional social protest.  As one who lost several family members to the Holcaust (Lurie was Jewish), Lurie used his art to express the utter horror of his wartime experiences.  He wished to communicate, in particularly and graphic form, the profound pain and suffering that marked this dark chapter in humanity's history.  Lurie didn't want people to forget.  He wanted to ensure that the memory of this blackness would remain with humanity to the end of its days.

     So we should remember.  Lurie's art helps us to look outside our historical moment.  It forces us to look beyond our frenetic pursuit of daily wants and needs.  His art urges us to grapple with the emptiness at the core of the human soul.  It causes us to ponder the darkness of a culture gone amuck.
     We need Lurie's art.  We need to remember.  We need to recognize our fallenness.  We cannot be fully human, human as magnificent, human as tragic, unless we do.