I visited the Art Institute of Chicago a few years ago. I was not aware, until I was there, that it housed Picasso’s The Old Guitarist. Maxine Greene had passed away that week and I had been struggling to find words. She has been a philosophical compass I use to navigate the terrain of life ever since graduate school, and I was sad. Greene had referenced Wallace Steven’s poem The Man with Blue Guitar in Variations on a Blue Guitar, a collection of her essays. The painting, from Picasso’s Blue Period, depicts and old musician with a contorted shape unbound by blindness and poverty playing his guitar. It makes me think about the power of the arts to wordlessly share grief and know comfort. It makes me think about, as Greene relates, imagination making empathy possible. It makes me think about the ability of the arts to meet us exactly where we are and envision what we are not yet.