A collaboration between a climate activist and an advocate for the visually impaired led to the creation of Palette to Purpose, an art exhibit to fundraise for disaster relief and cataract surgery.
Michelle So
Staff Reporter
Courtesy of Dahlia Kordit
Puerto Rico’s devastation in the wake of Hurricane Maria spurred Camila Young’s ’26 climate action. Anjal Jain ’26 yearned to cure her family member’s untreatable visual impairment.
Motivated by disaster and by pain, these two juniors at Yale College turned to artistic creation. Combining their prior expertise, they’ve organized an upcoming gallery titled, Palette to Purpose. The theme: “What is your ecological vision?”
Visual artists from the University and greater New Haven created pieces and were grouped with a musician or an engineer to add a nonvisual aspect to their artwork, whether it be through music or through touch. One showing will be March 24 to March 31 in the Ezra Stiles College art gallery. The second showing will be April 28 in the Yale Club of New York City.
“You feel emotion when you listen to music. You feel emotion when you look at a painting,” Young said. “If you mix two, you’re able to, kind of like, create this bridge between different senses that is all towards one goal, which is environmental advocacy and climate change awareness.”
Drawing inspiration
A self-described climate artist, Young is no stranger to activism. She has created art in the wake of disaster and has traveled to different countries to interview community members about their climate stories, which she then creates paintings of.
Young also founded a nonprofit called Relief after Disaster in high school, and won a United Nations Millennium Fellowship to help her kick off the inaugural Palette to Purpose exhibition in 2024.
Jain, a singer since age four, attended an arts high school. Growing up, her house was “always filled with music” — her brother playing Indian drums, her singing, songs playing on speaker.
Jain previously conducted research on music therapy for people with visual impairments. She found strong links between art therapy and how it improved mental health in low vision individuals.
“Arts are very visual by nature,” Jain explained. “We came up with this concept of a multidimensional art exhibit where not only you were consuming art by looking at it, but you’re also engaging the other senses.”
In 2019, Jain founded a nonprofit called EyeMatter to make the arts more accessible for the low vision community. She was inspired by collections in the New York Public Library that feature Braille and Talking Book Library, which makes written works more accessible to the blind.
Through a partnership with the World Wildlife Foundation, or WWF, the Palette to Purpose organizers are ensuring the creators create fact-checked art. Each pair of visual and tactile/musical artists works with a WWF educator who ensures their work is backed by science.
Funds from the art sale and gallery will go toward Direct Relief and Anekant Community Center, an organization that provides free cataract surgery in countries like India and Kenya.
The musician and the maker
Dahlia Kordit ’28 creates visual art with various physical mediums. She learned about Palette to Purpose through Yale Visual Artists and felt a call to get involved.
“I always try to push myself in new directions when I am creating a work of art. For me, this often means using materials in new ways that add to the meaning of my work,” Kordit told the News. “Since this exhibition is centered around the climate, I decided that it would be best to incorporate recycled materials into whatever I make.”
Kordit experimented with three-dimensionality, incorporating an old canvas and various material scraps into her piece.
The final product incorporates paper mache, “a technique that [she] had never tried before” but she feels adds both physical and symbolic depth.
Rory Bricca ’26 is the composer and improvisational pianist working with Kordit on her piece.
He received only a draft of what Kordit envisioned — then, just a foregrounded arm holding nature in the palm of its hand, surrounded by dark clouds.
The two exchanged voice memos and offered interpretations of the piece and how each perceived the composition.
“We discussed how the fate of our planet is in our hands, how we have the power and responsibility to act,” Bricca said. “I sent her a piano improvisation with beautiful major triads in the right hand being interrupted by a dissonant bass melody, which I thought would capture this juxtaposition between the beauty of nature and the terrifying power that our species has to destroy it.”
The duo struggled initially to “bridge the gap between art and music,” according to Bricca, but with Kordit’s suitemate, a spoken word poet, they were able to come up with five phrases highlighting different aspects of the visual work and have those overarching themes carry Bricca’s piece along.
“Another detail that I really look forward to incorporating in this piece is the concept of the red string of fate, as well as tying a knot around your finger in an effort to remember something,” Kordit told the News. “It goes back to how Rory described my piece — our fate is tied to the planet, and we have to do our best to remind ourselves of that.”
Singing for climate
Zaida Rio Polanco ’26 is an environmental studies major who has been a singer-songwriter for “as long as [she] can remember.”
In 2020, Rio performed in several climate justice protest concerts. She collaborated with Young last year for OurHouse, the annual arts showcase to promote student artists of color.
“I wrote a song called ‘Slow Violence’ about incremental changes due to climate change and how that ties to slow violence in relationships,” Rio said. “[Camila] made a live painting to it during the performance. It was really beautiful.”
The artist that Rio is working with right now for Palette to Purpose created a moving graphic design.
“If there was ever a time for the performing arts to really like come alive for social justice, climate justice, it would be now,” Rio said. “Under Trump, it’s just like … the call to action is so much more important now.”
Globally, at least 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment.
