Invisible Populations is a series of exhibitions, lectures, teach-ins, digital-media displays, and service-learning activities, which are all based on the premise that art has the power to make individuals and groups living on the fringes of society visible, to encourage social change, to inspire hope, and to transform not only our experience of ourselves, but also our understanding of the human condition.

Compare and Contrast A survey of Louisiana Lowbrow, street, or underground art which highlights the diversity of influences on the genre—and the mix of existentialist angst, twisted humor, and life-affirming exuberance that goes along with being an underground artist—is matched with an exhibition of forty educational panels showing how visual artists from Renaissance Europe to present-day Baton Rouge have used their powers to affect the process of social change.

This activity of distinguishing context and content is a very special kind of work which we celebrate every day in the School of Art and the Department of English at LSU. And its principal result is found in the way it leaves us with a bigger picture of ourselves and what it means to be human—not through a diminishment of the other but by expanding ourselves in a way that includes not just us and them, but everyone.

If we walk away from this encounter with the "other" seeing a little bit more of that bigger picture, understanding just a little bit more about what it means to be human, then the work of these artists and scholars has achieved its purpose, and is worth celebrating.