Transformative art has a role to play in informing us about a historic wrong. But first it must move us.

Take a song like Strange Fruit, which is in many ways the quintessential political protest song. Up to this point, protest songs functioned as propaganda, but Strange Fruit sung by Billie Holiday proved they could be art. As Dorian Lynskey wrote for The Guardian:

And then it happens. The house lights go down, leaving Holiday illuminated by the hard, white beam of a single spotlight.

She begins her final number.

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit." This, you think, isn't your usual lovey-dovey stuff. "Blood on the leaves and blood at the root." What is this? "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze." Lynching? It's a song about lynching? The chatter from the tables dries up. Every eye in the room is on the singer, every ear on the song. After the last word – a long, abruptly severed cry of "crop" – the whole room snaps to black. When the house lights go up, she's gone.

Do you applaud, awed by the courage and intensity of the performance, stunned by the grisly poetry of the lyrics, sensing history moving through the room? Or do you shift awkwardly in your seat, shudder at the strange vibrations in the air, and think to yourself: call this entertainment?

This, I believe, gets at the nub of the artistic impulse that is at the centre of the Secret Path project: Art that makes change.

A strong central image that goes straight to the heart is key to hooking us, the audience, in... to make us care.

It's the same in the news business. Think of the galvanizing effect of that single photograph of little Alan Kurdi, the T-shirt and shorts-wearing toddler washed up on that beach in Greece last summer. The rare and unique power that picture had to motivate governments to change decades of immigration policy. And compel citizens to unite in welcoming Syrian refugees.

The power of an image or an artwork to move us is something that is always hard to predict.

"What art can do is build a bridge across our differences, including our hostilities — and it can reach us in our pain. It's no magic bullet and when it is engaged, the outcomes are not predictable," John Franklin, executive director of the arts organization Imago and adjunct teacher at Trinity College, University of Toronto told me as I was framing this week's Cross Country Checkup program. "Art offers no guarantees but it is capable of surprising us and doing things beyond what we imagined."

Art also offers us images that focus on the core of the problem, zeros in and moves us enough to galvanize change.

They are images that stay with us, haunt our imaginations, echo in our brains long after the book has snapped shut, or the last notes die away in the music hall.

Image | Secret Path

Caption: A still from graphic novel The Secret Path, written by Gord Downie and illustrated by Jeff Lemire. (courtesy of Simon & Schuster)

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Gord Downie's haunting songs in The Secret Path, together with his graphic novel illustrated by Jeff Lemire, are replete with such images. We feel the humiliation of Chanie, staring wide-eyed at us, the viewer, as the priest wields his razor to lop off his hair. It's a humiliation that is mirrored in the row of boys standing behind him and in the memory of the many who lived through the residential school system.

It's an image that transcends polemics. We want to reach out and hold that scared boy. We want to do something. This is art that as Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, a teaching fellow in religion, philosophy and the arts at King's College London says, is both protest and commemorative.

It's a powerful "articulation of lived experience which connects with the world but in different ways from a discursive message." She points to the Bogside murals in Northern Ireland.

Just as the Chanie Wenjack projects unfold the history on our own door step, a history of the "Canada we didn't think we were," as Gord Downie writes, the Bogside Artists painted images that capture what it was like to live through the sectarian violence of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Their images sear the soul but don't preach at us.

It's what Dengerink Chaplin calls "embedded art" that "imaginatively discloses the world."

Image | Battle of the Bogside

Caption: Painting of Bernadette Devlin who began her career in Irish politics in 1969 and later lead the Battle of the Bogside. (Submitted by Bruce Driscoll)

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The Bogside Artists "don't display slogans, symbols, or flags; they don't appeal to any national or mythological history; they don't issue threats or demonize the enemy," she says. "Instead, they tell the story of a suffering and resilient community as they lived through the traumatic events that unfolded on their doorsteps. It is a visual document that resonates with visitors from many other places of conflict around the world."

It's a rare cultural feat to do well. A unique gift. And right now it's happening in Canada through the creative re-telling of Chanie Wenjack's story: a story first told in 1967 and now re-imagined for today.

"The great man of the age is one who can put into words the will of his age, tell its age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age," said German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Philosophy of Right.

Journalism at its best tackles the first two tasks. It takes artists, and then politicians, to really accomplish lasting change.