Events Calendar

The Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research defines AR as “practice-based, practice-led research in the arts,” often an interdisciplinary creative research that acts as a “driver for critical thinking, creativity, and open innovation.” Many artists understand their art-making to be a means of asking soaring questions; of helping audiences grasp the complexity of wicked problems; of shocking, literally moving, or seducing participants into risking new solutions; on enacting the art of intervention.

In this conversation, we will hear from a stunning group of artists, performers, proponents of arts-based interdisciplinary research, curators, museum directors, and artist-activists who reflect on the arts as research and how universities can support, celebrate, and reward artists when they turn from galleries to their communities.

This virtual event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. 

Panelists:

—Maryrose Flanigan is the executive director of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), where she oversees a network of universities which are committed to advancing arts-based and interdisciplinary research, practice, and teaching in higher education. She serves on a presidential advisory group for the arts initiative at a2ru’s headquarters at the University of Michigan and is part of the advisory cohort for the Imagining America’s Leading and Learning Initiative: Shifting Institutional Culture to Fortify Public Scholarship, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She previously served in various roles at the National Endowment for the Arts.

—Denise Frazier is an educator, performer, researcher of Africana Studies, and assistant director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. Located with the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane, the interdisciplinary Center supports research, teaching, and engagement with a focus on preserving, perpetuating, and celebrating distinctive cultures of New Orleans and the Gulf South. Frazier also manages the Music Rising at Tulane website, a wide-ranging database of Gulf South music. 

—Carlos Jackson is a visual artist and writer who is Professor and Chair of Chicana/o Studies at University of California, Davis. He has had numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States and is the author of Chicana and Chicano Art: ProtestArte (University of Arizona Press, 2009). Jackson co-founded Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer (TANA), a collaborative university-community partnership that offers a fully functioning silkscreen studio, Chicano/Latino Arts exhibition space, and a teaching center for the arts. TANA cultivates the cultural and artistic life of the community, viewing the arts as essential to a community's development and well-being.

—Lisa Yun Lee is a cultural activist and the Executive Director of the National Public Housing Museum. She is also an Associate Professor in Art History and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition, Lee teaches with the Prison Neighborhood Art Project and is a member of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials. She served as a Co-Chair of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Arts & Culture Transition Team and is currently on the Mayor's Committee for the evaluation of Monuments, Memorials, and Historical Reckoning. She is writing a book for Teacher's College Press about Jane Addams, and serves on the boards of the Field Foundation, 3Arts, and the Illinois State Museum.

About the new "What Do We Mean By Research Now?" series:
For many faculty members in the last decade the forms of artistic practice, scholarship, and research have undergone a sea change. Empirical methodologists in the social sciences engage with ethnographers. Artists take deep archival dives to prepare for plays and paintings. Engineers collaborate with anthropologists and English professors. Humanities scholars and technologists form international ArcGIS teams. Yet as the Mellon-funded Humane Metrics Initiative in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other professional organizations frequently point out, our systems of evaluation have not kept pace with these new methodologies and forms. This year, the Obermann Center is hosting a series of conversations across the disciplines to highlight the many experimental, cutting edge, even controversial creations, discoveries, interpretive work, empirical studies, STEM experiments, publicly engaged and interdisciplinary projects that ask us to expand our understanding of research and what it means to be a research university. All discussions will be virtual, free, and open to the public. View previous discussions.

Photo credit: Laurent Laveder, www.laurentlaveder.com, from his "Moon games" series.