On Identity, Culture, and Finding Common Ground: Art Knows No Borders

Live painting, spoken poetry, creative energy on display all night at the Color of Summer event (June 2026). Artist featured in photo: @fdzgraffiti

Belonging is one of those things that's easy to take for granted when you have it and surprisingly difficult to articulate when you don't. Most of us have experienced some version of walking into a room and doing a quiet internal calculation about where we fit, whether we're welcome, and how much of ourselves we're safe to bring to the surface. For some people that calculation is occasional. For others it's a near-constant background process, running underneath every social and professional interaction they navigate.

The experience of feeling caught between identities is its own particular kind of exhaustion. Not quite belonging in one place, not quite belonging in another, and spending a significant amount of energy trying to figure out which version of yourself the room is asking for. What I've found, over the course of a life spent moving between cultures, languages, and professional environments that weren't always built with someone like me in mind, is that art has a rare and underappreciated ability to cut through all of that. It doesn't ask you to explain yourself or prove your credentials for being in the room. It simply invites you to FEEL something, and in doing so, it dismantles the walls that most other approaches spend years trying to vault over.

That's what I experienced at the Color of Summer last weekend, an event produced by FACE614 and First Fridays Columbus, held at the Columbus Museum of Art. The evening featured live artists painting, spoken word poetry performed live, a full fashion show (my personal highlight of the evening), and music being played in every room you walked in as you explored around. An amazing evening designed to highlight the importance of art, culture & diversity.

Fashion as art, art as storytelling. The runway event at The Color of Summer was one of the most creative things I've seen in a while. The artists’ paintings in the galleries were also incredible. Artist featured: @payapics

On Growing Up Between Identities

When I first heard about this event, I knew instinctively that I wanted to attend. For starters, I'm a Latina woman who doesn't look it. I grew up speaking Spanish before English, raised between two cultural worlds that never quite overlapped in the way I needed them to. My English-speaking friends when I was younger didn't fully see or understand the Latina side of me, and within my own Latina community, I sometimes felt like an outsider looking in because I didn't fit the visual expectation of what that identity was supposed to look like. For a long time, I didn't have great language for what that experience felt like. I only knew that I was always doing a kind of “mental math” in every room I walked into, calculating which version of myself to lead with, which parts to make visible, and which parts to tuck away for later.

One of my own pieces. Painting has always felt like a language that doesn't require translation.

Years later when I was living and working in rural Japan, being one of very few foreigners in my city meant that I’d regularly encounter different experiences about what it meant to be visibly categorized as an outsider (sometimes literally being labeled as “unwelcome” by some locals). That time I spent in Japan deepened my own personal understanding of what it feels like to be on the outside looking in, doing so in ways that have greatly influenced how I show up in other places. Curiosity, I've personally come to believe, is one of the most reliable bridges between people who don't share the same starting point.

What Art Can Do That Empathy Workshops Can’t

We're not going to “conference” our way to genuine human understanding. Empathy and belonging can't be reduced to a training objective or a checklist item. The kind of connection that actually breaks down barriers between people tends to happen in moments that are experiential rather than instructional; in spaces where people are invited to feel something together rather than be taught something separately.

The Color of Summer event offered exactly that: a room where different kinds of people, from all sorts of different backgrounds, with different relationships to culture and art, could all share the same space and share their story and craft. I personally loved speaking with the different artists throughout the galleries, asking them what their different motivations were behind their various art pieces. When you get to see (or listen to) someone else's creative expression: their history, their passion, their identity and even struggles all rendered in paint or spoken word, you can’t help but respond to it instinctively. That moment where you connect on an emotional level to someone else’s lived experience - that’s actually where empathy begins.

The art in every gallery room was impossible to walk past without stopping. Same goes for the fashion designs featured during the runway event. Artist featured in left photo: @thecreativepayne

The Cultural Side of Breaking Down Silos

There’s an interesting relationship between what I experienced at this incredible night celebrating art & culture vs. what I often observe within organizations on a frequent basis (or lack thereof, to put this more plainly).

We often talk a great deal about breaking down silos at work, and we tend to mean it structurally: different departments not communicating effectively, information getting hoarded rather than shared. But the deeper and more meaningful version of silo-breaking is cultural. It's about whether the people sitting across from each other in a meeting actually understand each other as full human beings, with different backgrounds, different lenses, and different ways of experiencing the exact same room. We bring all that with us into how we approach our work and collaborate with others.

The most connected people I know – whether we’re talking professionally or personally - aren't the ones who have the most in common with everyone around them. They're the ones who stayed curious long enough to find common ground anyway.

Three people, three completely different backgrounds, one shared appreciation for the arts that crosses all cultures. Art knows no borders.

Explore More:

• Read my blog post: On Virtual Reality, Being a Deliberate Amateur, and Having Too Many Interests

• View my training services: Questing Insight

• Connect with me on LinkedIn: Sarah Kundla