Mighty Mouse 

Lucia Heffernan created this oil painting, "Mighty Mouse," intending to present the viewer with ideas of self-empowerment and challenging commonly held beliefs about power. The image creates meaning through the mice, visually coded as small and meek, juxtaposed against the empowering message written in the window, "You're small but Mighty." This cultural reference plays on themes of overcoming adversity. The scene seems to take place in contemporary America, a society that, despite its rhetoric of equality, often reinforces power structures based on size, wealth, and status. Here, Heffernan seems to critique this social structure. The mouse on the book could be read as a suggestion that knowledge is power. To understand this artwork better, one might research contemporary American social dynamics and popular psychology about self-empowerment. "Mighty Mouse" shows us that art's meaning is contingent on its social context.