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Article contents

Arts-based research.

Janinka Greenwood Janinka Greenwood University of Canterbury
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.29
Published online: 25 February 2019

Arts-based research encompasses a range of research approaches and strategies that utilize one or more of the arts in investigation. Such approaches have evolved from understandings that life and experiences of the world are multifaceted, and that art offers ways of knowing the world that involve sensory perceptions and emotion as well as intellectual responses. Researchers have used arts for various stages of research. It may be to collect or create data, to interpret or analyze it, to present their findings, or some combination of these. Sometimes arts-based research is used to investigate art making or teaching in or through the arts. Sometimes it is used to explore issues in the wider social sciences. The field is a constantly evolving one, and researchers have evolved diverse ways of using the communicative and interpretative tools that processes with the arts allow. These include ways to initially bypass the need for verbal expression, to explore problems in physically embodied as well as discursive ways, to capture and express ambiguities, liminalities, and complexities, to collaborate in the refining of ideas, to transform audience perceptions, and to create surprise and engage audiences emotionally as well as critically. A common feature within the wide range of approaches is that they involve aesthetic responses.

The richness of the opportunities created by the use of arts in conducting and/or reporting research brings accompanying challenges. Among these are the political as well as the epistemological expectations placed on research, the need for audiences of research, and perhaps participants in research, to evolve ways of critically assessing the affect of as well as the information in presentations, the need to develop relevant and useful strategies for peer review of the research as well as the art, and the need to evolve ethical awareness that is consistent with the intentions and power of the arts.

multisensory
performance

Introduction

The term arts-based research is an umbrella term that covers an eclectic array of methodological and epistemological approaches. The key elements that unify this diverse body of work are: it is research; and one or more art forms or processes are involved in the doing of the research. How art is involved varies enormously. It has been used as one of several tools to elicit information (Cremin, Mason, & Busher, 2011 ; Gauntlett, 2007 ; Wang & Burns, 1997 ) and for the analysis of data (Boal, 1979 ; Gallagher, 2014 ; Neilson, 2008 ), and so it serves as an enrichment to the palette of tools used in qualitative research. It has been used in the presentation of findings (Bagley & Cancienne, 2002 ; Conrad, 2012 ; Gray & Sinding, 2002 ) and so occupies a space that could be responded to and evaluated as both art and research. It has been used to investigate art and the process of art-making. The emergence of the concept and practice of a/r/tography (Belliveau, 2015 ; Irwin, 2013 ; Springgay, Irwin, & Kind, 2005 ), for example, places art-making and its textual interpretation in a dynamic relationship of inquiry into the purpose, process, and meaning of the making of an artwork.

The field is multifaceted and elusive of definition and encompassing explanation. This article does not attempt such definitions. But it does risk describing some well-trodden pathways through the field and posing some questions. Illustrative examples are offered from the author’s work, as well as citing of works by other researchers who use arts-based approaches.

My own explorations of arts-based research began many years ago, before the term came into usage. I was commissioned to develop a touring play for a New Zealand youth theater, and I chose to write a docudrama, Broadwood: Na wai te reo? (Greenwood, 1995 ). The play reported the case of a remote, rural, and predominantly Maori school that made Maori language a compulsory subject in its curriculum. The parents of one boy argued against the decision, claiming the language held no use for their son. The dispute was aired on national television and was debated in parliament. The minister agreed that the local school board had the right to make the decision after consultation with parents and community. The dispute ended with the boy being given permission to do extra math assignments in the library during Maori language classes. To develop the script, I interviewed all the local participants in the case and sincerely sought to capture the integrity of their views in my dialogue. I accessed the minister of education’s comments through public documents and media and reserved the right to occasionally satirize them. Just a week or two before final production, the family’s lawyer officially asked for a copy of the script. To my relief, it was returned with the comment that the family felt I had captured their views quite accurately. The youth theater was invited to hold its final rehearsal on the local marae (a traditional tribal Maori ground that holds a meeting house and hosts significant community occasions), and a local elder offered the use of an ancestral whalebone weapon in the opening performance, instead of the wooden one made for the production. The opening performance took place in the school itself, and the boy, together with his parents and family friends, sat in the audience together with hundreds of community people. The play had an interactive section where the audience was asked to vote in response to a survey the school had originally sent out to its community. The majority of the audience voted for Maori language to be part of the mandatory curriculum. The boy and his family voted equally emphatically for it not to be. The play then toured in New Zealand and was taken to a festival in Australia.

At the time I saw the work purely in terms of theater—albeit with a strongly critical social function. Looking back, I now see it was a performative case study. I had carefully researched the context and respectfully interviewed participants after gaining their informed consent. The participants had all endorsed my reporting of the data. The findings were disseminated and subject to popular as well as peer review. The performances added an extra dimension to the research: they actively invited audience consideration and debate.

This article discusses the epistemology that underlies arts-based approaches to research, reviews the purposes and value of research that involves the arts, identifies different stages and ways that art may be utilized, and addresses questions that are debated in the field. It does not seek to disentangle all the threads within this approach to research or to review all key theorizations and possibilities in the field. The arena of arts-based research is a diverse and rapidly expanding one, and it is only possible within this discussion to identify some of the common underlying characteristics and potentialities and to offer selected examples. Because this discussion is shaped within an essay format, rather than through a visual or performative collage, there is the risk of marking a limited number of pathways and of making assertions. At the same time, I acknowledge that the discussion might have alternatively been conducted through arts-based media, which might better reflect some of the liminalities and interweaving layers of art-based processes (see further, Greenwood, 2016 ).

The term art itself compasses a wide and diverse spectrum of products and process. This article focuses particularly on dramatic and visual art, while acknowledging that the use of other art forms, such as poetry, fiction, dance, film, and fabric work, have been variously used in processes of investigation. The word art is used to indicate the wider spectrum of art activities and to refer to more specific forms and processes by their disciplines and conventions.

Why Use Art?

One of the main reasons for the growth of arts-based approaches to research is recognition that life experiences are multi-sensory, multifaceted, and related in complex ways to time, space, ideologies, and relationships with others. Traditional approaches to research have been seen by increasing numbers of researchers as predominantly privileging cerebral, verbal, and linearly temporal approaches to knowledge and experience. The use of art in research is one of many shifts in the search for truthful means of investigation and representation. These include, among others, movements toward various forms of narratives (Riessman, 2008 ), recognition of indigenous knowledges, and indigenous ways of sharing and using knowledge (Bharucha, 1993 ; Smith, 2014 ), auto-ethnographies (Ellis, 2004 ), conceptualizations of wicked questions (Rittel & Webber, 1973 ), processes of troubling (Gardiner, 2015 ), and queering (Halperin, 2003 ). Preissle ( 2011 ) writes about the “qualitative tapestry” (p. 689) and identifies historic and contemporary threads of epistemological challenges, methods, and purposes, pointing out the ever-increasing diversity in the field. Denzin and Lincoln ( 2011 ) describe qualitative research as a site of multiple interpretative practices and, citing St. Pierre’s ( 2004 ) argument that we are in a post “post” period, assert that “we are in a new age where messy, uncertain multi-voiced texts, cultural criticism, and new experimental works will become more common, as will more reflexive forms of fieldwork, analysis and intertextual representation” (p. 15). Springgay, Irwin, and Kind ( 2005 ) assert that a/r/tography is not a new branch of qualitative research but a methodology in its own right, and that it conceptualizes inquiry as an embodied encounter through visual and textual experiences. The use of art in research is a succession of approaches to develop methodology that is meaningful and useful.

Art, product, and process allow and even invite art-makers to explore and play with knowing and meaning in ways that are more visceral and interactive than the intellectual and verbal ways that have tended to predominate in Western discourses of knowledge. It invites art viewers to interact with representations in ways that involve their senses, emotions, and ideas. Eisner ( 1998 , 2002 ) makes a number of significant assertions about the relationship between form and knowledge that emphasize the importance of art processes in offering expanded understandings of “what it means to know” (Eisner, 1998 , p. 1). He states: “There are multiple ways in which the world can be known: Artists, writers, and dancers, as well as scientists, have important thongs to tell about the world” (p. 7). Like other constructivists (Bruner, 1990 ; Guba, 1996 ), he further argues that because human knowledge is a constructed form of experience, it is a reflection of mind as well as nature, that knowledge is made, not simply discovered. He then reasons that “the forms through which humans represent their conception of the world have a major influence on what they are able to say about it” (p. 6), and, making particular reference to education, he states that whichever particular forms of representation become acceptable “is as much a political matter as an epistemological one” (p. 7). Eisner’s arguments to extend conceptualizations of knowledge within the field of education have been echoed in the practices of art-based researchers.

Artists themselves understand through their practice that art is way of coming to know the world and of presenting that knowing, emergent and shifting though it may be, to others. Sometimes the process of coming to know takes the form of social analysis. In Guernica , as a well-known example, Picasso scrutinizes and crystallizes the brutal betrayals and waste of war. In Caucasian Chalk Circle , Brecht fractures and strips bare ideas of justice, loyalty, and ownership. Their respective visual and dramatic montages speak in ways that are different from and arguably more potent than discursive descriptions.

In many indigenous cultures, art forms are primary ways of processing and recording communally significant information and signifying relationships. For New Zealand Māori, the meeting house, with its visual images, poetry, song, oratory, and rituals, is the repository library of mythic and genealogical history and of the accumulated legacies of meetings, contested positions, and nuanced consensual decisions. Art within Māori and other indigenous culture is not an illustrative addition to knowledge systems, it is an integral means of meaning making and recording.

One of the characteristics of arts and arts-based research projects is that they engage with aesthetic understandings as well as with discursive explanations. The aesthetic is a contested term (Greenwood, 2011 ; Hamera, 2011 ). However, it is used here to describe the engagement of senses and emotion as well as intellectual processes, and the consequent collation of semiotics and significances that are embedded in cultural awareness and are variously used by art makers and art viewers to respond to works of art. An aesthetic response thus is a visceral as well as rational one. It may be comfortable with ambiguities, and it may elude verbalization.

The processes of art-making demand a commitment to a continuous refinement of skills and awareness. Art-viewers arguably also gain more from an artwork as they acquire the skills and literacies involved with that particular art form and as they gain confidence to engage with the aesthetic. However, viewers may apprehend meaning without mastery of all the relevant literacies. I recall an experience of watching flamenco in El Puerto de Santa Maria, a township outside Cadiz. My senses drank in the white stone of former monastery walls and the darkening sky over an open inner courtyard. My muscles and emotions responded spontaneously to the urgency of the guitar and the beaten rhythms on a packing case drum. My nerves tensed as the singer’s voice cut through the air. The two dancers, both older and dressed in seemingly causal fawn and grey, riveted my attention. I was a stranger to the art form, and I did not know the language of the dance and could not recognize its phases or its allusions. I did feel the visceral tug of emotion across space. My heart and soul responded to something urgent, strangely oppressive, but indefinable that might have an apprehension of what those who understand flamenco call duende . If I was more literate in the art form, I would no doubt have understood a lot more, but the art, performed by those who did know and had mastered its intricacies, communicated an experience of their world to me despite my lack of training. In that evening, I learned more about the experience of life in southern Spain than I had in my earlier pursuit of library books and websites.

Art, thus, is positioned as a powerful tool that calls for ever-refining expertise in its making, but that can communicate, at differing levels, even with those who do not have that expertise. Researchers who use art draw on its rich, and sometimes complex and elusive, epistemological bases to explore and represent aspects of the world. The researchers may themselves be artists; at the least, they need to know enough of an art form to be aware of its potential and how to manipulate it. In some cases intended participants and audiences may also be artists, but often they are not. It is the researcher who creates a framework in which participants join in the art or in which audiences receive it.

Art, Research Purpose, and Research Validity

So far, the argument for the value of art as a way of knowing is multifarious, embodied, and tolerant of ambivalences and ambiguities. Where then are the rigors that are widely held as essential for research? It can be argued that arts-based research, to be considered as research, needs to have explicit research purpose and needs to subject itself to peer critique.

As has been widely noted (Eisner, 1998 ; Leavy, 2017 ; Sullivan, 2010 ), the making of art involves some investigation, both into the process of making and into some aspect of the experiential world. In research, that purpose needs to be overt and explicit. When the purpose is identified, then the choice of methods can be open to critical scrutiny and evaluation. The design of an arts-based research project is shaped, at its core, by similar considerations as other research.

Arts-based research needs to be explicit about what is being investigated. If the objective is not clear, then the result may still be art, but it is hard to call it research. Purpose determines which of the vast array of art strategies and processes will be selected as the research methods. The trustworthiness of any research depends on a number of factors: at the design stage, it depends on a clear alignment between the purpose of the research and the methods selected to carry out the investigation. In arts-based research, as in other research, it is vital that the researcher identifies the relationship between purpose and selected art tools, and offers recipients of the research clear means to evaluate and critique the reliability and usefulness of the answers that come from the research. This is where choices about strategies need to be clearly identified and explained, and both the aims and boundaries of the investigation need to be identified.

This does not imply need for a rigid and static design. Art is an evolving process, and the research design can well be an evolving one, as is the case with participatory action research (Bryndon-Miller, Karl, Maguire, Noffke, & Sabhlok, 2011 ), bricolage (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011 ), and a number of other research approaches. However, the strategic stages and choices of the emergent design donot need to be identified and explained. Nor does it imply that all data or findings need to be fully explicable verbally. One of the reasons for choosing arts-based methods, although not the only one, is to allow the operation of aesthetic and subconscious understandings as well as conscious and verbalized ones. That is part of the epistemological justification for choosing an arts-based approach. The ambivalences and pregnant possibilities that result may be considered valued gains from the choice of research tools, and their presence simply needs to be identified, together with explication of the boundaries of how such ambivalence and possibilities relate to the research question.

Different Kinds of Purpose

The sections of this article examine common and different areas of purpose for which arts-based research is frequently used, arranging them into three clusters and discussing some of the possibilities within each one.

The first, and perhaps largest, cluster of purposes for using arts-based research is to investigate some social (in the broadest sense of the word) issue. Such issues might, for example, include woman’s rights, school absenteeism, gang membership, cross-cultural encounters, classroom relationships, experiences of particular programs, problems in language acquisition. The methodological choices involved in this group of purposes have been repeatedly addressed (e.g., Boal, 1979 ; O’Brien & Donelan, 2008 ; Finley, 2005 ; Leavy, 2017 ; Prosser, 2011 ; Wang & Burns, 1997 ) in discussions of the use of arts-based approaches to the social sciences. The intention for using arts-based tools is to open up different, and hopefully more empowering, options for exploring the specific problem or issue, and for expressing participants’ perspectives in ways that can bypass participants’ discomfort with words or unconscious compliance with dominant discourses, or perhaps to present findings in ways that better reveal their dynamics and complexity than written reports.

Another smaller, but important, cluster of purposes is to research art-making processes or completed art works. For example, a theater director (Smithner, 2010 ) investigates the critical decisions she made in selecting and weaving together separate performance works into a theatrical collage. Or, a researcher (O’Donoghue, 2011 ) investigates how a conceptual artist working with film and video enquires into social, political, and cultural issues and how he shapes his work to provoke viewers to develop specific understandings. These kinds of studies explore the how and why of art-making, focusing on the makers’ intentions, their manipulation of the elements and affordances of their specific art field, and often engage with aesthetic as well as sociocultural dimensions of analysis. Often such studies are presented as narratives or analytic essays, and it is the subject matter of the research that constitutes the arts basis. Sometimes, such studies find expression in new artworks, as is the case in Merita Mita’s film made about the work of painter Ralph Hotere (Mita, 2001 ), which interlays critical analyses, documentation of process, interviews, and pulsating images of the artworks.

The third cluster involves research about teaching, therapy, or community development through one or more of the arts. Here arts are primarily the media of teaching and learning. For example, when drama is the teaching medium, the teacher may facilitate the class by taking a fictional role within the narrative that provokes students to plan, argue, or take action. Students may be prompted to use roles, create improvisations, explore body representations of ideas or conflicts, and explore contentious problems in safely fictitious contexts. Because it examines both work within an art form and changes in learners’ or community members’ understandings of other issues, this cluster overlaps somewhat with the two previous clusters. However, it is also building a body of its own traditions.

One strong tradition is the documentation of process. For example, Burton, Lepp, Morrison, and O’Toole ( 2015 ) report two decades of projects, including Dracon and Cooling Conflict , which have used drama strategies as well as formal theoretical teaching to address conflict and bullying. They have documented the specific strategies used, discussed their theoretical bases, and acknowledged the evidence on which they base their claims about effectiveness of the strategies in building understanding about and reducing bullying. The strategies used involved use of role and improvisation and what the authors call an enhanced form of Boal’s Forum Theatre. Other examples include the Risky Business Project (O’Brien & Donelan, 2008 ), a series of programs involving marginalized youth in dance, drama, music, theater performance, stand-up comedy, circus, puppetry, photography, visual arts, and creative writing; explorations of cross-cultural understandings through drama processes (Greenwood, 2005 ); the teaching of English as a second language in Malaysia through teacher-in-role and other drama processes (Mohd Nawi, 2014 ); working with traditional arts to break down culturally bound ways of seeing the world (Stanley, 2014 ); and the training of a theater-for-development team to use improvisational strategies to address community problems (Okagbue, 2002 ). While the strategies are arts processes and the analysis of their effect addresses aesthetic dimensions of arts as well as cognitive and behavioral ones, the reporting of these projects is primarily within the more traditional verbal and discursive forms of qualitative research.

Sometimes the reporting takes a more dramatic turn. Mullens and Wills ( 2016 ) report and critically analyze Re-storying Disability Through the Arts , an event that sought to create space for dialogue between students, researchers, artists, educators, and practitioners with different involvements or interests in disability arts. They begin their report by re-creating a scene within the workshop that captures some of the tensions evoked, and follow this with a critical commentary on three community-based art practices that engage in a strategy of re-storying disability. They present arts as means to “counter powerful cultural narratives that regulate the lives and bodies of disabled people” (Mullens & Wills, 2016 , p. 5). Barrett ( 2014 ) reports a project, informed by an a/r/tography methodology, which utilized the classroom teaching of the prescribed arts curriculum to allow students to explore evolving understandings of identity and community. Montages of photographs are a central component in the report, as is a series of images that illustrate Barrett’s reflections on her own role within the investigation.

Using Art to Research Social Issues: Collecting Data

Within a social science research project, art processes might be used to collect data, to carry out analysis and interpretation, or to present findings. Perhaps the most common use is to collect data. The process of photovoice (Wang & Burns, 1997 ), for example, gives participants cameras and asks them to capture images that they consider as significant elements of the topic being investigated. Graffiti might be used to prompt absentee students to discuss their perceptions of schooling. Body sculptures, freeze frames, and hot seating are examples of drama strategies that could be used to facilitate reflection and debate about cross-cultural encounters, feelings about hospitalization, experiences of domestic violence, or an array of other topics.

In each case the art produced becomes the basis for further discussion. This process is quite different from historical concepts of art therapy, where the therapist would give expert insight into what a patient’s artwork means; here it is the participants who give the explanation, perhaps independently or perhaps through dialogue with other participants and the researcher. The embodied experience of construction provides a platform and a challenge to talking in ways that are more thoughtful and more honest than through a conventionally structured verbal interview. The talk after making is important, but the art products are not merely precursors to verbal data, they are concrete points of references to which both participants and researchers can refer and can use to prompt further introspection or deconstruction. The process of making, moreover, is one that allows time for reflection and self-editing along the way and so may yield more truthful and complex answers than those that might be given instantly in an interview. Participants who are second language speakers or who lack the vocabulary or theoretical constructs to express complex feelings, reactions, or beliefs can be enabled to use physicalization to create a bridge between what they know or feel wordlessly inside them and an external expression that can be read by others.

The art tools available for such data gathering are as varied as the tools used by artists for making art. They might include drawing, collage, painting, sculpting materials or bodies, singing, orchestration, Lego construction, movement improvisation, creation of texts, photography, graffiti, role creation, and/or spatial positioning.

Art Processes as Tools for Analysis

Art processes can also be used to analyze and interpret data. Within qualitative paradigms, the processes of collecting and interpretation of data often overlap. This is also true of arts-based research. For instance, Greenwood ( 2012 ) reported on a group of experienced Bangladeshi educators who came to New Zealand to complete their Masters. While they were proficient in English, they found colloquial language challenging, struggling often to find words with the right social or emotional connotations at the speed of conversation. In previous discussions, they often looked to each other for translation. A teaching workshop, held as an illustration of arts-based research, addressed the research question: what have been your experiences as international students? A small repertoire of drama strategies, particularly freeze frames with techniques for deconstructing and refining initial offers, short animations, and narrative sequencing were used. These prompted participants to recall and show personal experiences, to critically view and interpret one another’s representations, and to further refine their images to clarify their intended meaning. The participants flung themselves into the challenge with alacrity and flamboyance and created images of eagerness, hope, new relationships, frustration, failed communication, anger, dejection, unexpected learning, and achievement. They also actively articulated ideas as we deconstructed the images and, through debate, co-constructed interpretations of what was being shown in the work and what it meant in terms of their experience, individual and shared, of overseas study. The interweaving of making, reflection, discussion, and further refinement is intrinsic to process drama; as a research method, it affords a means of interweaving data collection and collaborative analysis. In this case the participants also debated aspects of the validity of the process as research, raising questions about subjectivity in interpretation, about the nature of crystallization (Richardson, 1994 ), about informed consent, and about co-construction of narratives. Analysis shifted from being the task of an outsider researcher to one carried out, incrementally and experimentally, by insider participants. While the researcher held the initial power to focus the work, participants’ physical entry into the work, and their interrogation of the images that were created constituted a choice of how much they would share and contribute, and so they became active and sometimes playful partners in the research. This approach to analysis shares many features with participatory action research (Brydon-Miller et al., 2011 ), both in eliciting the agency of participants and in evolving a process of analysis that is interwoven with the gathering of data from preceding action and with the planning of further investigative cycles of action.

The work of Boal is perhaps one of the best known examples of the use of an art process, in this case theater, as a means of analysis of data. Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed ( 1979 ) details a series of strategies for deconstruction and collaborative analysis. For example, in the process he calls image theatre , participants select a local oppressive problem that they seek to resolve. They create and discuss images that exemplify experience of the problem and their idealized solutions (the data); they then analyze their images to find where power resides and how it is supported. Boal’s theater process calls for experimentation with further images that explore scenarios where power could become shared to some extent and could allow further action by those who experience the oppression. The process finishes with consequential explorations of the first step to be taken by participants as a means to work toward an equilibrium of power. Boal, as the title of his book, Theatre of the Oppressed , acknowledges, draws on the work of his Braziailan compatriot, Freire, and particularly on his concept of conscientization (Freire, 1970 , 1972 ). Boal’s process for analyzing experiences of oppression is not so much a direct action plan as a means of analyzing the mechanisms of specific conditions of oppression and the potential, however limited, for agency to resolve the oppression. The sequenced strategies of creating and discussing alternative images of oppression, power relationships, and action enable participants to deconstruct the socio-cultural reality that shapes their lives and to gain awareness of their capacity to transform it.

Art as a Means to Present Findings

There is a large and growing body of research that presents findings in arts forms. A few examples are briefly discussed.

After collecting data, through interviews and official communications from participants in a case where a district school was being threatened with closure, Owen ( 2009 ) commissioned a composer to write a score for sections of his transcripts and create a community opera. He expressed the hope that this would “transform their tiny stories into noisy histories” (p. 3). Part of the data was sung at a conference I attended. I was struck by the shift in power. What I might have regarded as dull data in a PowerPoint presentation now became a compelling articulation of experiences and aspirations and a dynamic debate between personal lives and authoritarian policy.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt project (Morris, 2011 ; Yardlie & Langley, 1995 ) is frequently described as the world’s greatest piece of community folk art. A claim can be made that, while each panel in the quilt is a product of folk art, the collation of the quilt in its enormity is a work of conceptual art that juxtaposes the fragility and isolation of individual loss with the overwhelming global impact of the AIDS epidemic. The quilt can also be seen as research that visually quantifies the death toll through AIDS in Western world communities and that qualitatively investigates the life stories and values of those who died through the perceptions of those who loved them.

A number of museums throughout the world present visual and kinaesthetic accounts of social and historical research. Well-known examples are the Migration Museum in Melbourne, the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, and the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism in Munich. A less securely established exhibition is that of images of the Australian Aboriginal Stolen Generation that was collected by the Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation to educate community and schoolchildren, “but only had the funding to showcase the exhibit for one night” (Diss, 2017 ). These and many other exhibitions create visual and experiential environments where the data of history can be not only seen and read but also felt.

In a similar way to how these exhibitions use actual archival photographs, theater may use the exact words of interviews to re-tell real stories. In making Verbatim , Brandt and Harcourt ( 1994 ) collated the words from 30 interviews with convicted murderers, their families, and the families of murder victims. “We went into the prisons to find out what the story was that we were going to tell, and that was the story that emerged from the material we collected,” Harcourt explained (White, 2013 ). “Not only the content, but also the form emerged from that context. We didn’t go in having decided we were going to make a solo show. Form emerged from the experience of the prison system.”

A frequently used form is that of ethnodrama (Mienczakowski, 1995 ; Saldaña, 2008 ). Ethnodrama presents data in a theatrical form: using stage, role, and sometimes lighting and music. Saldaña ( 2008 ) explains that ethnodrama maintains “close allegiance to the lived experiences of real people while presenting their voices through an artistic medium” (p. 3) and argues that the goals are not only aesthetic, they also possess emancipatory potential for motivating social change within participants and audiences.

Sometimes the ethnographic material is further manipulated in the presentation process. Conrad ( 2012 ) describes her research into the Native program at the Alberta youth corrections center in play form as “an ethnographic re-presentation of the research—a creative expression of the research findings” (p. xii). Her play jumps through time, creating fragments of action, and is interspersed by video scenes that provide alternative endings that could result from choices made by the characters. Conrad explains her choice of medium: “Performance has the potential to reach audiences in ways beyond intellectual understanding, through engaging other ways of knowing that are empathetic, emotional, experiential, and embodied, with the potential for radically re-envisioning social relations” (p. xiii).

Belliveau ( 2015 ) created a performative research about his work in teaching Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in an elementary school. He interwove excerpts of students’ performances from the Shakespearean text with excerpts of their discussions about the issues of power, pride, love, and other themes in a new performance work that illustrated as well as explained primary students’ response to Shakespeare. He later presented a keynote at the IDEA (International Drama in Education Association) conference in Paris where he performed his discussion of this and other work with young students. Similarly, Lutton’s ( 2016 ) doctoral research explored the work and challenges of selected international drama educators using imagination and role play. In her final performance of her research, she took the role of an archivist’s assistant at a fictitious Museum of Educational Drama and Applied Theatre to provide “an opportunity for drama practitioners to use their skills and knowledge of drama pedagogy to tell their own stories” (Lutton, p. 36). She states that her choice of research tool embraces theatricality, enabling the embodiment of participants’ stories, the incorporation of critical reflection and of aesthetic knowledge (p. 36).

The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil , developed by John McGrath and the 7:84 Theatre Company, recounts the history of economic exploitation of the Scottish people, from the evictions that followed the clearances for the farming of Cheviot sheep, through the development of Highland stag hunts, to the capitalist domination of resources in the 1970s oil boom. Within a traditional ceilidh form it tells stories, presents arguments, and uses caricature, satire, and parody. The play is the result of research and of critical analysis of movements of power and economic interests. It is also a very effective instrument of political persuasion: McGrath gives the dispossessed crofters a language that tugs at our empathy whereas that of the landlords provokes our antagonism. Is this polemics or simple historic truth? Does the dramatic impact of the play unreasonably capture our intellects? And if the facts that are presented are validated by other accounts of history does it matter if it does? What is, what should be, what can be the relationship between research and the evocation, even manipulation of emotions?

Emotion—and Its Power

In as much as arts offer different ways of knowing the world, their use at various stages of research has the power to influence both what we come to know and how we know it. Art tools, strategically used, allow access to emotions and visceral responses as well as to conscious ideas. That makes them powerful for eliciting information. It also makes them powerful in influencing audiences.

The photos of the brutality of the police and of the steadfastness of the activists in the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg are examples of powerfully influencing as well as informing data. As well as the events that are recorded, the faces and the bodies speak through the photos. Their exhibition in blown-up size at eye level together with film footage and artifacts create a compellingly powerful response in viewers. Like many others, I came out of the museum emotionally drained and confirmed, even strengthened, in my ideological beliefs. The power of the exhibition had first sharpened and then consolidated my understandings. Was this because of the power of the facts presented in the exhibition, or was it because of the power of their presentation ? Or was it both? When the issue presented is one like apartheid, I am not afraid of having my awareness influenced in multiple ways: I believe I already have an evidence-informed position on the subject. I also applaud the power of the exhibition to inform and convince those who might not yet have reached a position. But what if the issue was a different one? Perhaps one which I was more uncertain about? Might it then seem that the emotional power of the exhibition gave undue weight to the evidence?

The issue here is not a simple one. The presentation is not only the reporting of findings: it is also art. The researcher (in the artist) stays true to the data; the artist (in the researcher) arranges data for effect and affect. Conrad explicitly states her hope that her choice of presentation mode will add impact to her research findings: she wants the presentation of her research about youth in detention centers to engender more empathetic understandings of their experiences and lead, in turn, to more constructive attitudes toward their needs. By putting their words to music, Owen wants his audience to listen more attentively to opinions of the stakeholders in the schools threatened with closure. McGrath wants his audience to side with those dispossessed by the combined power of capital and law. The Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation plans to emotionally move as well as to inform its community. In writing Broadwood , I meticulously presented both sides of the dispute, I deliberately placed music and metaphor at the service of Maori language, and I deliberately used the spatial suggestiveness of the stage to evoke possibilities in the ending. The boy is alone in the library while his classmates are on the marae listening to an elder explain the history of their meetinghouse. The elder gives them an ancient whalebone weapon to hold, the students pass it among themselves, then hold it out across space to the boy. The boy stands, takes half a cautious step toward them and then stops; the lights go down. I intended the audience to complete the action in their subconscious.

In each of these cases, the art form of the presentation allows the artist/researcher to manipulate affect as well as critical cognition. To my mind, this is not simply another iteration of the argument between subjectivity and objectivity in research. Many contemporary approaches to research openly recognize that knowledge is mediated by context, experience, and social and historical discourses as well as by individuals’ personal interpretation (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011 ; Ellis, 2004 ). It is shaped by what is left out as well as by what is included. The practice of careful and scrupulous reflexivity is a way of acknowledging and bounding the subjectivity of the researcher (Altheide & Johnson, 2011 ; Ellingson, 2011 ). The researcher-who-is-artist draws on a subconscious as well as a conscious sense of how things fit together, and constructs meaning subconsciously as well as consciously, manipulating affect and effect in the process. Perhaps all researchers do so to some extent. For instance, the deliberately invisible authors of much quantitative research, who allow the passive voice to carry much of the reporting, who triangulate and define limitation, create an effect of fair-minded and dependable authority. The affect is not necessarily misleading, and it is something that readers of research have learned to recognize. However, the researcher-who-is-artist can draw on the rich repertoire of an art field that already operates in the domain of the aesthetic as well as of the critically cognitive, in spaces that are liminal as well those that are defined. It is arguable that readers of research still need to recognize and navigate through those spaces. Arguably, the challenge exists not only in the field of research: it is present in all the media that surrounds our daily lives.

A/r/tography and Examination of Places Between

The challenge of exploring liminal spaces of intention, process, explanation, effect, and affect is seriously taken up by the emergent discipline of a/r/tography . The backslashes in the term speak of fracture; they also denote the combined authorial roles of artist, researcher, and teacher. Springgay, Irwin, and Kind ( 2005 ) explain that a/r/tography is deliberately introspective and does not seek conclusions: rather it plays with connections between art and text and seeks to capture the embodied experience of exploring self and the world. Irwin et al. ( 2006 ) state: “Together, the arts and education complement, resist, and echo one another through rhizomatic relations of living inquiry” (p. 70). A/r/tography is explicitly positioned as a practice-based and living inquiry: it explores but resists attempting to define the spaces between artist, teacher, and researcher, and so implicitly rejects boundaries between these roles. It conceptualizes inquiry as a continuing experiential process of encounter between ideas, art media, context, meaning, and evolving representations. At the same time as it blurs distinctions, it teases out interrelationships: it offers art inquiry as something that is purposeful but unfixed, and art knowing as something that is personally and socially useful, but at best only partially and temporarily describable, never definable. This is one reason why its proponents explain it as a substantively different and new methodology outside the existing frameworks of qualitative research.

A/r/tography emerged out of the field of art education, with the explicit aim to extend the opportunities afforded by education in the arts, and to develop means to record and report the complex facets of learning and teaching in the arts. Consequently its language may be experienced, by readers who are outside the discipline, as highly abstract, deliberately ambiguous, and even esoteric: it seems to speak, as many research disciplines do, primarily to others in its own field. However, its broad principles have been picked up, and perhaps adapted, by practitioners who seek to explore the processes of their students’ learning through the arts and the evolving understandings they develop. For instance, Barrett and Greenwood ( 2013 ) report exploration of the epistemological third space through which place-conscious education and visual arts pedagogy can be interwoven and through which students, many of whom do not aspire to become artists, can use art-making to re-imagine and re-mark their understandings of their physical and social context and of their relationship with community. The value of this kind of research is posed in terms of the insights it affords rather than its capacity for presenting authoritative conclusions.

A Conference Debate, and the Politics of Research

Whether the provision of insights is enough to make art-making into research is a question that is frequently and sometimes fiercely contested. One such debate took place at a European conference I recently attended. It occurred in an arts-based research stream, and it began with the presentation of two films. The films were relatively short, and a discussion followed and became increasingly heated. Personally, I liked the films. The first reported a dance process that became an undergraduate teaching text. The second, in layers of imagery and fragments of dialogue, explored the practice of two artists. However, I was not sure what the added value was in calling either research. I saw art responding to art, and that seemed valuable and interesting enough. Why was the construct of research being privileged? The filmmakers defended the claim to research on the grounds that there was inquiry, on the grounds that art spoke in languages that were best discussed through art, and on the grounds that research was privileged in their institutions. Then a respected professor of fine arts put forward more direct criticism. Research, he argued, needed to make explicit the decisions that were made in identifying and reporting findings so that these would be accessible for peer review. Neither film, he said, did so. Defenses from the audience were heated. Then another senior art educator argued that art itself could not just be self-referential: it had to open a space for others to enter. The debate continued in corridors long after the session ended.

That the criticisms were unrelenting seemed an indication of how much was at stake. The space held by arts-based research within the European academic congregation is still somewhat fragile. The arts-based network was formed because of advocates’ passionate belief in the extended possibilities that arts-based methods offer, and this year again it expressed its eagerness to receive contributions in film and other art media as well as PowerPoint and verbal presentations. However, the network also saw itself as a custodian of rigor.

The participants in the session re-performed an argument that lingers at the edges of arts-based research. At the far ends of the spectrum, art and research are readily recognizable, and when art is borrowed as a tool in research, the epistemological and methodological assumptions are explicable. But the ground is more slippery when art and research intersect more deeply. When is the inquiry embedded within art, and when does it become research? Is it useful to attempt demarcations? What is lost from art or from research if demarcations are not attempted? The questions, as well as possible answers, are, as Eisner suggested, political as well as philosophical and methodological.

The doing of research and its publication have become big academic business. Universities around the world are required to report their academics’ research outputs to gain funding. My university, for example, is subject to a six-yearly round of assessment of research performance, based primarily on published and on funded research outputs. Each academic’s outputs are categorized and ranked, and the university itself is ranked and funded, in comparison with the other universities in the country. There is pressure on each academic to maximize research publications, even at the cost, it often seems, of other important academic activities, such as teaching. The competitive means of ranking also increases contestations about what is real research, serving both as a stimulus for positioning differing forms of inquiry as research and as a guarded gateway that permits some entries and denies others. Politicians and policymakers, in their turn, favor and fund research that can provide them with quotable numbers or clear-cut conclusions. Arts-based research still battles for a place within this politico-academic ground, although there appears to be growing acceptance of the use of art tools as means to elicit data.

Site for Possibilities—and Questions

The politics of research do matter, but for researchers who are committed to doing useful research, there are other factors to consider when choosing research approaches. These include the potentialities of the tools, the matter that is to be investigated, and the skills and practice preferences of the researcher.

The emergence and development of processes of arts-based research are grounded in belief that there are many ways of knowing oneself and the world, and these include emotions and intuitive perceptions as well as intellectual cognition. The epistemology of arts-based research is based on understandings that color, space, sound, movement, facial expression, vocal tone, and metaphor are as important in expressing and understanding knowledge as the lexical meanings of words. It is based on understandings that symbols, signs, and patterns are powerful means of communication, and that they are culturally and contextually shaped and interpreted. Arts-based research processes tolerate, even sometimes celebrate, ambiguity and ambivalence. They may also afford license to manipulate emotions to evoke empathy or direct social action.

The use of arts-based processes for eliciting participants’ responses considerably increases researchers’ repertoire for engaging participants and for providing them with means of expression that allow them to access feelings and perceptions that they might not initially be able to put into words as well as giving them time and strategies for considering their responses. The use of arts-based processes for analysis and representation allow opportunities for multidimensional, sensory, and often communal explorations of the meaning of what has been researched. It also presents new challenges to receivers of research who need to navigate their way not only through the overt ambiguities and subjective expression, but also through the invisible layers of affect that are embedded in art processes.

The challenges signal continuing areas of discussion, and perhaps work, for both arts-based researchers and for the wider research community. Does the use of art in representation of research findings move beyond the scope of critical peer review? Or do we rather need to develop new languages and strategies for such review? Do we need critical and recursive debate about when art becomes research and when it does not? Are the ambiguities and cognitive persuasions that are inherent in arts-based representations simply other, and useful, epistemological stances? Does the concept of research lose its meaning if it is stretched too far? Does art, which already has a useful role in interpreting and even shaping society, need to carve out its position as research? Does the entry of arts-based research into the arena of research call for revisions to the way we consider ethics? How do the procedures of institutional ethics committees need to be adapted to accommodate the engagement of the human body as well as the emergent design and ambiguities of the arts-based research processes? What are the more complex responsibilities of arts-based researchers toward their participants, particularly in terms of cultural protocols, reciprocity of gains, and the manipulation of emotions and cognition through visually or dramatically powerful presentations?

The already existing and expanding contribution of arts-based researchers argues vigorously for the place of arts processes in our congregations of research discussion and production. Quite simply, the arts address aspects of being human that are not sufficiently addressed by other methodologies. They are needed in our repertoire of tools for understanding people and the world. However, like other research approaches, they bring new challenges that need to be recognized and debated.

Research Art is Everywhere. But Some Artists Do It Better Than Others.

By Kavior Moon

Kavior Moon

Dozens of archival documents—showing text too small to read and vintage photos of white men—are pinned in a semi-ordered, semi-chaotic grid.

In a bustling urban street, five people in masks hold shields that say "police." In the foreground, the back of someone's head covers half the scene, and they are holding up three fingers.

In the Global South, Labeling a Research Project "Art" Can Be a Tool for Evading Censorship

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How did this come to be? On the institutional front, art schools have been establishing programs and centers for “artistic research” and “research-creation,” particularly in Canada and across Europe, for more than 20 years. In 1997 the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki established an early notable doctoral program for artists; two decades later, PhD degrees in art are available in multiple countries. Globally renowned curators such as Catherine David, Okwui Enwezor, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Ute Meta Bauer made their careers organizing large-scale international exhibitions often laden with research-based art and organized within a curatorial framework predicated on theory. Now, there are professional artists with research-based practices teaching their students various research methodologies and encouraging the production of yet more research-based works.

The current trend has an even longer historical trajectory when related to artists and their motivations. One might find traces in the work of Leonardo da Vinci or 17th-century naturalists such as Maria Sibylla Merian. Hito Steyerl, a contemporary research artist par excellence, describes the formal and semiotic investigations of Soviet avant-garde circles in the 1920s as formative for research art today. In her 2010 essay “Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research as Discipline and Conflict,” Steyerl discusses authors, photographers, and self-proclaimed “factographers”—including Dziga Vertov, Sergei Tretyakov, Lyubov Popova, and Aleksandr Rodchenko—whose epistemological debates centered on terms such as “fact,” “reality,” and “objectivity.” From Constructivism, in which artists were redefined as designers, technicians, and engineers engaged in developing new approaches to constructing forms, emerged the program of Productivism and the associated method called “factography.”

A row of 6 brick New York buildings with fire escapes. Under each, there are blocks of typewritten text.

Factographers aimed to chronicle and analyze modern life, particularly through texts, photography, and film. They did not claim to portray reality objectively and impartially (as opposed to conventional documentary makers) but rather to actively transform reality through ideological acts of signification, through new modes of production and collective reception. As Steyerl reminds us, “fact comes from [the Latin] facere , to make or to do.”

Another pivotal moment in the historical development of research-based art came with the conceptual turn in art in the 1960s and ’70s, particularly with the emergence of institutional critique. Moving away from formalist painting and sculpture, Conceptual artists contended that the idea or concept of an artwork (not its physical form) was the art. Texts, diagrams, photographs, and other forms of matter-of-fact documentation feature heavily in the works of Conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth, the Art & Language group, Mel Bochner, Hanne Darboven, and Christine Kozlov, among others. From this point of view, art can be seen as a transmission of “information,” the term curator Kynaston McShine used to title his landmark Conceptual art survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970.

WITH ARTISTS INCLINED TOWARD INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE like Hans Haacke, one begins to see research not just informing the work of art but becoming an essential part of its content. A significant early example is Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), which was made using extensive information that Haacke found in the New York County Clerk’s records. The work is simply a presentation of facts: it comprises 142 photographs of building facades and empty lots, maps of the Lower East Side and Harlem indicating each property’s location, and texts and charts detailing information about transfer of ownership, land value, and mortgage lenders.

A canvas showing lines of typewritten text.

With prolonged viewing, one notices that the many corporations that owned the properties were actually run by notorious landlord Harry J. Shapolsky and his relatives and associates, who bought, sold, and mortgaged the properties within their own real estate group. The shell corporations effectively obscured the properties’ ownership ties to the Shapolsky family as well as the tax advantages these inside deals conferred. One of the city’s biggest slumlords at the time, Shapolsky had previously been indicted for bribing building inspectors and convicted of rent-gouging.

For institutional critique artists, research became a key means to investigate and expose various social systems and the sociopolitical context of the art world. In doing so, the aim was to show how what we consider “art” is not timeless but in fact socially constructed, powerfully conditioned by the conventions and normalizing practices of art institutions. Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. was one of the reasons the artist’s major solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that year was famously canceled after then director Thomas Messer accused Haacke of “muckraking,” calling his work “extra-artistic” and a potential “alien presence” within the museum.

Although Haacke clearly made visible the machinery behind one of the most lucrative real estate operations in New York, the more fundamental threat, art historian Rosalyn Deutsche has pointed out, was how his work would have framed a series of slum properties against the museum’s pristine space, revealing it as a highly controlled space of material privilege. Deutsche persuasively argues that Haacke’s work implicitly raises questions about how proprietorial interests shape not only urban space but cultural spaces as well—a line of inquiry that Haacke and other institutional critique artists would develop in subsequent research-based works.

An installation with two listening stations in the form of headphones inside cubicles with one chair each. They are labeled funk station 1 and funk station 2. In the middle, under a sign that reads

THE LAST MOMENTOUS SHIFT in the 20th century occurred around the 1980s and ’90s, as more and more artists used research to inform their works reflecting feminism, postcolonialism, queerness, and other forms of identity politics. An early example is Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79), a six-part series that juxtaposes documentation of the artist’s experience as a new parent and the development of her son during the first six years of his life with research on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. A feminist critique of Conceptual art as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis, Post-Partum Document presents the mother-child relationship as an intersubjective exchange of signs between mother and child.

During these decades, artists often used archival materials or the form of the archive in their works, making research-based art to recuperate overlooked histories and marginalized figures or groups. In her landmark Import/Export Funk Office (1992–93), Renée Green presented books, magazines, photographs, cassette tapes, videotaped interviews, and other source materials taken from both her library and that of German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen, creating an extensive audiovisual archive of international hip-hop and African diasporic culture in the United States and Germany. Hal Foster termed this tendency “an archival impulse,” looking at the works of Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, and Thomas Hirschhorn.

Another artistic approach entails questioning the authority and authenticity of archives by pointing out their inherent biases. Between 1989 and 2004, Walid Raad developed a collection of both found and fabricated materials—documents, notebooks, photographs, news clippings, interview transcripts, and videos—related to the Lebanese Civil War (1975–91). His archival displays, presented under the guise of an imaginary foundation named “The Atlas Group,” blend fact and fiction to deconstruct the truth claims of documentary media, and bespeak distrust of official narratives, while also exploring the links between history, memory, trauma, and fantasy.

A datebook open to the week of May 18 1989. The days are filled in with Arabic handwriting, and in the centerfold, someone has scribbled a torpedo with red pen.

ONE CAN SEE a variety of research-based approaches in the practices of numerous artists today, applied with varying degrees of success. Some critics have voiced skepticism of much research-based art currently in vogue. In a 2019 lecture at the Kunsthalle Wien, Claire Bishop decried many research-based artworks as “information overload” and mere “aggregation” without hierarchy or narrative in ways that are symptomatic of our “browsing” habits in the internet age.

While a number of artists have used research as a crucial component in large-scale works—Steyerl in her immersive installations, Hirschhorn in his sprawling “monuments” to various critical theorists—others favor a more understated mode: pared-back, subtle, and visually economical. These artists often start by researching objects, ideas, events, or sites, and pair their installations with detailed supplemental texts that make one reconsider the presented materials in light of what can’t immediately be seen, often intangible issues of historical context, social injustice, and the law.

Maria Eichhorn, a second-generation institutional critique artist, bridges that now-established approach with the practices of younger research-based artists. For the 1997 edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster, she used the production fee she received to purchase a plot of land near the center of the show’s host city. Declaring the vacant lot a public sculpture, she titled her project Acquisition of a plot, Tibusstraße, corner of Breul, communal district of Münster, plot 5, drawing attention to the site’s recent history: years prior, residents had mobilized to stop the building of luxury condominiums there, and formed a tenants association to protect the availability of affordable housing.

In a gallery, a towering bookcase extends to the ceiling, flanked by vitrines showing open books.

Eichhorn exhibited a copy of the plot’s purchase contract and deed in the Landesmuseum, alongside a booklet detailing her research into the origins of cities in Europe, the historical establishment of land registers and real property, and the problem of affordable housing in present-day Munster. Instead of installing a piece of decorative “plop art,” Eichhorn prompted visitors to reflect on the economic and social realities of everyday urban spaces and the conflict of public and private interests. At the end of the exhibition, the artist sold the plot back to the city and donated its resale value to the area’s tenants association.

More recently, Eichhorn has focused on goods unlawfully obtained by the German state. For her 2003 exhibition “Politics of Restitution” at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, she worked with historian Anja Heuss to research the provenance of 15 paintings in the Lenbachhaus’s art collection on permanent loan from the Federal Republic of Germany. After World War II and until 1962, the Allies sought to return art objects stolen by the Nazis; after that, the remaining 20,000 or so unclaimed items were declared state property. Heuss determined that 7 of the 15 paintings were likely stolen or forcibly taken from their Jewish owners. Eichhorn displayed these paintings so as to reveal the markings on the reverse that document how they changed hands over time. She also exhibited another painting in the Lenbachhaus’s collection that was formally restituted just a year earlier to the heirs of its original Jewish owner.

Chronicling how these paintings got to where they are begs a follow-up question: what other objects currently in public collections were wrongfully taken by the state? Eichhorn’s 2017 Documenta project built on her work at Lenbachhaus, but dealt more actively with restitution. In Kassel, she created a project called “The Rose Valland Institute,” to investigate the looting of all forms of Jewish-owned property, not just artworks, since 1933. Her multiroom installation centered around a towering shelf filled with books from the main public library in Berlin. A wall text claimed that the nearly 2,000 volumes on view were once owned by Jewish persons and unlawfully acquired by the municipal library in 1943. Eichhorn also displayed photos, auction records, inventory lists, and other documents related to the confiscation of Jewish-owned assets, artworks, books, and other material possessions, as well as a reference library of publications on these issues.

Viewers also learned from accompanying texts that the Rose Valland Institute is an actual functioning organization, based in the Neue Galerie in Kassel for the run of the exhibition (and now in Berlin), whose mission is to return the looted items to their rightful owners or their descendants. Eichhorn’s project provokes viewers to actively question how objects in the country’s public collections were acquired, and to make their own restitution claims or provide other pertinent information.

Like Eichhorn, Cameron Rowland displays found objects accompanied by detailed handouts that elucidate the dark histories the objects index. Rowland’s work often addresses racialized exploitation and its ongoing effects, such as a piece titled Assessment (2018) that comprises an 18th-century English grandfather clock once housed at a plantation in South Carolina, and three 19th-century receipts that show property taxes were collected on slaves, clocks, and livestock alike in slaveholding states.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Rowland displayed Assessment alongside used everyday objects—leaf blowers, a hedge trimmer, a stroller, and bicycles—placed casually around the gallery. These items were purchased at police auctions of goods taken through civil asset forfeiture, a legal proceeding in which law enforcement can seize without warrant property believed to be connected to illegal activity. Originating in the English Navigation Act of 1660 to maintain England’s monopoly on trade with its colonies and West Africa, civil asset forfeiture has since thrived in the United States. Today, it is practiced by police departments as well as federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Astoundingly, Rowland notes in their text that in 2013, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency under DHS, contributed $1 billion in seized property to the Treasury Forfeiture Fund.

Just as property taxes on slaves were used to fund state governments in the antebellum South, auction sales from civil asset forfeiture are used to fund the agencies that seize properties. Together, the objects in Rowland’s show link issues of property concerning enslaved and undocumented people to highlight the dispossession and profiteering that results when groups of people are denied the protections of citizenship.

Where Eichhorn has focused on restitution, Rowland spotlights reparations. For Disgorgement (2016), part of an exhibition at Artists Space in New York, Rowland established an entity called the Reparations Purpose Trust, evidenced by framed legal documents on view there. Through this trust, they purchased shares of the insurance company Aetna, Inc., which had once profited from issuing insurance policies on the lives of slaves to slaveowners. The trust is to hold these company shares until the US government passes a law to make financial reparations for slavery, at which point the trust will dissolve and give its shares to the federal agency responsible for making the payments.

Where Rowland has focused on reparations, Gala Porras-Kim proposes mediation as a form of redress. In her project “Precipitation for an Arid Landscape” (2022), first presented at Amant in Brooklyn, she displayed works centered on Maya objects collected by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. In several large drawings, collectively titled “Offerings for the Rain at the Peabody Museum,” she depicts objects found in the Chichén Itzá cenote, a sacred Maya sinkhole in Mexico. These objects were originally deposited as offerings to Chaac, the Maya god of rain, lightning, and thunder, but between 1904 and 1911, the American diplomat and archaeologist Edward H. Thompson dredged them up.

A circular enclosure in the center of the gallery displayed photographs, documents, letters, newspaper clippings, and other publications from the Peabody archives and elsewhere, enabling viewers to learn about the troubling circumstances that brought the objects into the museum. Thompson purchased property around the cenote in order to access it before smuggling the artifacts into the US; an 1897 Mexican law made exporting antiquities illegal.

In a framed letter to the Peabody Museum’s director, part of a work titled Mediating with the Rain (2021–), Porras-Kim points out that the desiccated condition of the Chaac objects is at odds with their intended wet state. The objects were meant to remain in the cenote, where they had been preserved in water. Exposure to air and the excessive dryness of the museum’s climate-controlled storage rooms have permanently changed their physical composition. Now, she notes, the objects are “just dust particles held together through conservation methods.” Porras-Kim suggests opening a dialogue on how the objects could at least regain what she calls their “dignitary interests” and thus be spiritually restituted in some form. One idea she has proposed is to designate the objects as owned by the rain and “on loan” to the museum.

In combining artistic research and institutional critique, artists like Porras-Kim and the others surveyed here are critically interrogating the institutions thought to be arbiters of authority. In other words, they are researching research to question the norms of knowledge production and to challenge the status quo. Rather than conducting investigations in order to present conclusive results, they unsettle and expand how we can see the world with all its inglorious pasts.

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Research as art: revealing the creativity behind academic output

Associate Professor of Engineering, Swansea University

Disclosure statement

Richard Johnston receives funding from EPSRC and the Welsh European Funding Office.

Swansea University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Research is the lifeblood of modern universities, but there are very few ways for those behind the academic output to show the real creativity and emotion that underpins it. The story of the research is lost – the many failures that led to the results, the often tortuous process, or the ecstatic highs of successes and the serendipitous path that changes the researcher’s career all fall by the wayside.

Researchers are creative by nature – and at Swansea University we wanted to give them the opportunity to communicate their work in a different way, as art. Our annual Research as Art competition gives researchers a platform to explore their creativity and convey the emotion and humanity in their research.

The striking images entered into the competition are the hook to draw the audience in, but the text is the researcher’s opportunity to engage with people. The most compelling submissions aren’t just an image that was lying on a lab hard drive for years, or a beautiful false-coloured electron microscopy image by which colour is added to an image so that researchers can see the different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are the submissions that describe the years of failure in the laboratory, the inspiration, and the way researchers question themselves daily.

Below are just a selection of the images from this year’s winners, accompanied by their own words.

“Beauty in failure”, by Emmanuel Péan, PhD researcher, SPECIFIC

This photo, taken with an optical microscope, is the result of a perovskite [a type of mineral] sample that went wrong.

The resulting picture looks like meteors crashing onto a sun. Those “meteors” and their “tails” may have been formed by the presence of impurities on the sample. In contrast, the “sun” might have resulted from ethyl acetate not uniformly diffusing into the perovskite sublayer [the slice of mineral].

Scientific research is not always fruitful, however, it is when you make mistakes that you learn the most and have the most fun.

“Data saves lives: how do feelings become numbers?”, by Ann John, professor of medicine

I work with big data to explore children and young people’s mental health, analysing millions of anonymised routinely collected health records in a secure environment.

In a public lecture I was asked “how do feelings become numbers?”. So in collaboration with artist Karen Ingham we worked with young people to use new technology differently, and explore feelings more directly. We asked them to create a 3D immersive version of their state of mind using a virtual reality VIVE headset with a tilt brush. They could walk in, out and around these visual representations of feelings – a true mind-body approach.

“Hiding in plain sight”, by Simon Robinson, research officer, computer science

In nature, some animals can blend into their environments to avoid being eaten or to reduce their impact on the ecosystem around them.

Taking inspiration from these evolved systems, we investigate the notion of chameleon-like approaches for mobile interaction design. Our approach shows the value of the concept and motivates further research in materials and form factors that can provide more effective automatic plain-sight hiding.

“Banality from familiarity”, by Elizabeth Evans, PhD researcher, engineering

I wonder whether we researchers can become so close to our work that it becomes banal to us. Not boring or without merit, but something we have become so familiar with we forget that it’s original and unique work that no one else is doing.

Every day I analyse ancient volcanic ash using cutting edge x-ray microscopes, but it takes a third party to remind me how out of the ordinary such a career is.

“Iron on the dress: redressing the story of Amy Dillwyn”, by Kirsti Bohata, professor of English literature and creative writing

Amy Dillwyn was one of the first British female industrialists. She has been painted as a woman whose bright future was dashed by the death of her fiancé when she was just 18. In reality, she was already in love with the woman who would dominate her life and fiction for the next 30 years. Her radical novels – some of the earliest lesbian fiction in print –- bend gender and reject romantic endings.

“The iron on the dress” was created by sculptor Mandy Lane , who poured molten iron over a century-old wedding dress. One observer remarked of the image: “It is like a crime scene, and it is a crime, the crime is the fact that we need to retell the story of this clearly influential woman”.

This research, and the artwork, is about uncovering and correcting the historical and literary record.

“Mirror trees: programmable liquid metal spreading tree structures”, by Timothy Neate, research officer, future interaction technology lab

We aim to create future mobile user interfaces which are highly changeable in both their visual and tactile appearance.

Our image shows the spreading effects when a voltage is applied across EGaIn (an alloy of Gallium and Indium). Its surface tension is affected by the potential across the electrodes causing dramatic spreading effects. This means that the metal transitions from an almost perfect spheroid, to a great, flat, intricate branching tree structure. Modulating the voltage, then, can cause rapid oscillating effects to provide exciting visual and tactile feedback.

“Aberration”, by Alexandros Alampounti, PhD researcher, physics

In our lab, we are working with atoms cooled to a millionth above absolute zero. Atomic motion becomes so slow that you can interact with them with astonishing precision. To “talk” to the atoms we need some form of postman to deliver this information: we use an optical fiber -400 nanometres thick! We place the nanofiber close to the atoms and shine a laser through it.

Simply because the size of the fiber is smaller than the wavelength of light that passes through it, light “spills out” due to a quantum mechanical effect akin to quantum tunnelling. It is thanks to this “spillage” that light propagating through the fiber can interact with the atoms which are outside of it! In this image, you see this exact “spillage” from our optical nanofiber. The beautiful pattern arises from a slight misalignment of the camera lenses, known as spherical aberration.

“Bioblocks: building for nature”, by Ruth Callaway, SEACAMS research officer (industrial and business)

Over 200 children used cubes of clay to sculpt ecologically attractive habitats for coastal creatures. These bioblocks demonstrate that human-made structures can support marine life, while children and their families have gained a better understanding of the unique resilience of sea creatures.

It is hoped that the diverse and complex habitat will enable more species to use this new material as a living space: crevices and holes will provide shelter; variable textures and overhangs will allow animals and seaweed to cling to the material.

Science communication
Virtual reality
Photographs

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Why Arts-Based Research?

First Online: 05 May 2019

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Caroline Lenette 2

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The term ‘arts-based research’ encompasses a range of different methods of inquiry for interpretation, meaning-making, and representation of lived experiences. The approach involves the use of any art form, at any point in the research process, to generate, interpret, or communicate new knowledge. In this chapter, I outline what arts-based methods are and their value to social science research. I provide key examples to highlight the range of possibilities afforded by arts-based research in refugee studies. This diversity can be at the source of resistance to recognise the legitimacy of arts-based approaches and their potential as new ways of knowing.

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The Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research edited by Knowles and Cole ( 2008 ), and the Handbook of Arts - Based Research by Leavy ( 2019 ) offer comprehensive outlines of methods, genres and methodologies in arts-based research. Kara ( 2015 ) has pointed out that it is difficult to provide a definitive account of all methods as the field of creative research changes at a very fast rate.

A new method that warrants attention in research is the use of immersive or virtual reality (VR) as an effective tool to convey lived realities by depicting the immediacy of situations to wider audiences irrespective of location. According to Valérie Gorin from University of Geneva (personal communication, November 2017), the use of VR in forced migration constitutes a ‘reactivation of old storytelling strategies’ inherent to human communication to change the way we look at migration. Recent examples include VR companies collaborating with non-government agencies and news media companies to produce powerful stories about forced migration. Examples of projects using a 360 degree immersive environment are UNICEF’s Clouds over Sidra , filmed in the Zaatari camp (Jordan), the Red Cross’ Four Walls, and Médecins Sans Frontières’ Forced from Home . The media is also adopting an ‘immersive journalism’ approach to this topic (see New York Time’s The Displaced or BBC’s We Wait ).

See videos at https://walkingborders.com/ .

This is an international collaboration with Associate Professor Marusya Bociurkiw, Ryerson University, Canada, and Associate Professor Elena Marchevska, London South Bank University, UK. The project is funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Development grant, and explores migration and homemaking strategies in three sites (Toronto, Sydney, and London).

From the beginning of my academic career, I was determined that my writing would have ‘soul’, and that I would privilege Knowledge Holders’ narratives and storytelling elements in academic writing. In doing so, I experienced some resistance or rejection, but not always.

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The prize aims to foster and encourage innovative, experimental new formats of publication and to give visibility to the qualities of artistic research artefacts.

We received 14 very good and diverse applications from different disciplines. The evaluation was carried out by a jury composed of Paulo Luís Almeida, Jacek Smolicki and Blanka Chládková. The jury highly appreciates the quality and compactness of the exhibition by Andreas Berchtold titled “ In circles leading on “:

exposition landing page: a dancer standing in a circle of rectangles.

Honorable mentions go to: “ Spotting A Tree From A Pixel ” by Sheung Yiu and “ Fragments in Time ” by Tobias Leibetseder, Thomas Grill, Almut Schilling, Till Bovermann.

Read the full jury report here .

14th SAR Conference Trondheim: recordings available

Video recordings of the opening and the keynote speeches by Pier Luigi Sacco and Anjalika Sagar, as well as the program produced in the KIT video studio are available at the conference website .

SAR Prize (2021) Winner Announced!

The Executive Board of SAR is delighted to announce the winner of the Annual Prize for Excellent Research Catalogue Exposition 2021. “ Minuting. Rethinking the Ordinary Through the Ritual of Transversal Listening ” by Jacek Smolicki.

He is followed by Alexandra Crouwers with her exposition “ Plot, the Compositor, Mourning/Mistakes ” on the second place and Timo Menke with his exposition “ DARK MATTER(S) ” on the third place.

Read the complete report here .

SAR General Assembly Election Results:

We hereby announce the results of the SAR elections that took place during the SAR General assembly on 4th of July 2022 in Weimar:

Florian Schneider has been elected SAR president (for 2022-2026)

Geir Ström has been re-elected SAR First Vice President/Treasurer (for 2022-2024)

Both Blanka Chládková & Esa Kirkkopelto have been elected as SAR board member (for 2022-2026)

See “ Who we are ” for more information.

Call for Establishing SAR Special Interest Groups – SIGs

The Executive Board is delighted to renew its Call for Establishing SAR Special Interest Groups (SIGs). SIGs may be suggested, organised, and moderated by any SAR member (individual members, representatives of institutional members) with the aim of conducting a particular activity, theme or focus area under the umbrella of SAR and promoting the activity and its results within the SAR community. For more information on establishing a SIG see: SAR Special Interest Groups (SIGs) .

CALL FOR SOLIDARITY AND PEACE

SAR expresses its solidarity with artists and researchers who as a consequence of war now have to fear for their own lives, and of those of their families and friends. We want to express our compassion with all those innocent civilians who are suffering. We are horrified about the ruthlessness with which civilian targets are attacked in the Ukraine, and we appeal for an immediate end to aggression, bloodshed and destruction and a return to human values in sight of the global future of the planet.

Like our partner associations AEC and ELIA, we state that the artistic research community is a global community where peaceful collaborations between people of all backgrounds are a lived reality. Thousands of Ukrainian and Russian students, academics, artists and researchers in art practices are at the same time working together peacefully all over Europe and the world. We stand by all these artists, as well as with Ukrainian people, in solidarity. We likewise call on all SAR member institutions to support refugees from the war zone within their possibilities to be able to continue their art studies in a non-bureaucratic way.

The future of life on the planet depends on the human ability for peaceful conflict resolution.

The SAR Presidents, Executive Board members, and Executive Officer

Vienna declaration

SAR is proud to present the Vienna Declaration , a policy paper advocating for the full recognition of Artistic Research across Europe. More than one year ago, the main organisations and transnational networks dealing with Artistic Research at European level and beyond decided to join forces to increase the visibility and recognition of this strand of research. The Vienna Declaration , co-written by AEC , CILECT / GEECT , Culture Action Europe , Cumulus , EAAE , ELIA , EPARM , EQ-Arts , MusiQuE and SAR, is the first outcome of this important collaboration. The initiative is open to the involvement of other international organisations proving legitimate interest.

The long term aims of this concerted action, and the formulation of documents such as the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research and the Florence Principles on the Doctorate in the Arts , are to secure full recognition of artistic research both within international as well as national research directories and funding schemes.

SARA / Society for Artistic Research Announcement service

SAR enables individual and institutional members as well as non-members to distribute announcements of relevance to artistic research environments, such as symposia, conferences, exhibitions, performances, publications, study programmes, available positions etc. via a dedicated email list, reaching colleagues who have registered at the Research Catalogue (RC).

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Home » Artistic Research – Methods, Types and Examples

Artistic Research – Methods, Types and Examples

Table of Contents

Artistic Research

Definition:

Artistic Research is a mode of inquiry that combines artistic practice and research methodologies to generate new insights and knowledge. It involves using artistic practice as a means of investigation and experimentation, while applying rigorous research methods to examine and reflect upon the process and outcomes of the artistic practice.

Types of Artistic Research

Types of Artistic Research are as follows:

Practice-based Research

This type of research involves the creation of new artistic works as part of the research process. The focus is on the exploration of artistic techniques, processes, and materials, and how they contribute to the creation of new knowledge.

Research-led practice

This type of research involves the use of academic research methods to inform and guide the creative process. The aim is to investigate and test new ideas and approaches to artistic practice.

Practice-led Research

This type of research involves using artistic practice as a means of exploring research questions. The aim is to develop new insights and understandings through the creative process.

Transdisciplinary Research

This type of research involves collaboration between artists and researchers from different disciplines. The aim is to combine knowledge and expertise from different fields to create new insights and perspectives.

Research Through Performance

This type of research involves the use of live performance as a means of investigating research questions. The aim is to explore the relationship between the performer and the audience, and how this relationship can be used to create new knowledge.

Participatory Research

This type of research involves collaboration with communities and stakeholders to explore research questions. The aim is to involve participants in the research process and to create new knowledge through shared experiences and perspectives.

Data Collection Methods

Artistic research data collection methods vary depending on the type of research being conducted and the artistic discipline being studied. Here are some common methods of data collection used in artistic research:

Artistic production: One of the most common methods of data collection in artistic research is the creation of new artistic works. This involves using the artistic practice itself as a method of data collection. Artists may create new works of art, performances, or installations to explore research questions and generate data.
Interviews : Artists may conduct interviews with other artists, scholars, or experts in their field to collect data. These interviews may be recorded and transcribed for further analysis.
Surveys and questionnaires : Surveys and questionnaires can be used to collect data from a larger sample of people. These can be used to collect information about audience reactions to artistic works, or to collect demographic information about artists.
Observation: Artists may also use observation as a method of data collection. This can involve observing the audience’s reactions to a performance or installation, or observing the process of artistic creation.
Archival research : Artists may conduct archival research to collect data from historical sources. This can involve studying the work of other artists, analyzing historical documents or artifacts, or studying the history of a particular artistic practice or discipline.
Experimental methods : In some cases, artists may use experimental methods to collect data. This can involve manipulating variables in an artistic work or performance to test hypotheses and generate data.

Data Analysis Methods

some common methods of data analysis used in artistic research:

Interpretative analysis : This involves a close reading and interpretation of the artistic work, performance or installation in order to understand its meanings, themes, and symbolic content. This method of analysis is often used in qualitative research.
Content analysis: This involves a systematic analysis of the content of artistic works or performances, with the aim of identifying patterns, themes, and trends in the data. This method of analysis is often used in quantitative research.
Discourse analysis : This involves an analysis of the language and social contexts in which artistic works are created and received. It is often used to explore the power dynamics, social structures, and cultural norms that shape artistic practice.
Visual analysis: This involves an analysis of the visual elements of artistic works, such as composition, color, and form, in order to understand their meanings and significance.
Statistical analysis: This involves the use of statistical techniques to analyze quantitative data collected through surveys, questionnaires, or experimental methods. This can involve calculating correlations, regression analyses, or other statistical measures to identify patterns in the data.
Comparative analysis: This involves comparing the data collected from different artistic works, performances or installations, or comparing the data collected from artistic research to data collected from other sources.

Artistic Research Methodology

Artistic research methodology refers to the approach or framework used to conduct artistic research. The methodology used in artistic research is often interdisciplinary and may include a combination of methods from the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Here are some common elements of artistic research methodology:

Research question : Artistic research begins with a research question or problem to be explored. This question guides the research process and helps to focus the investigation.
Contextualization: Artistic research often involves an examination of the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which the artistic work is produced and received. This contextualization helps to situate the work within a larger framework and to identify its significance.
Reflexivity: Artistic research often involves a high degree of reflexivity, with the researcher reflecting on their own positionality and the ways in which their own biases and assumptions may impact the research process.
Iterative process : Artistic research is often an iterative process, with the researcher revising and refining their research question and methods as they collect and analyze data.
Creative practice: Artistic research often involves the use of creative practice as a means of generating data and exploring research questions. This can involve the creation of new works of art, performances, or installations.
Collaboration: Artistic research often involves collaboration with other artists, scholars, or experts in the field. This collaboration can help to generate new insights and perspectives, and to bring diverse knowledge and expertise to the research process.

Examples of Artistic Research

There are numerous examples of artistic research across a variety of artistic disciplines. Here are a few examples:

Music : A composer may conduct artistic research by exploring new musical forms and techniques, and testing them through the creation of new works of music. For example, composer Steve Reich conducted artistic research by studying traditional African drumming techniques and incorporating them into his minimalist compositions.
Visual art: An artist may conduct artistic research by exploring the history and techniques of a particular medium, such as painting or sculpture, and using that knowledge to create new works of art. For example, painter Gerhard Richter conducted artistic research by exploring the history of photography and using photographic techniques to create his abstract paintings.
Dance : A choreographer may conduct artistic research by exploring new movement styles and techniques, and testing them through the creation of new dance works. For example, choreographer William Forsythe conducted artistic research by studying the physics of movement and incorporating that knowledge into his choreography.
Theater : A theater artist may conduct artistic research by exploring the history and techniques of a particular theatrical style, such as physical theater or experimental theater, and using that knowledge to create new works of theater. For example, director Anne Bogart conducted artistic research by studying the teachings of the philosopher Jacques Derrida and incorporating those ideas into her approach to theater.
Film : A filmmaker may conduct artistic research by exploring the history and techniques of a particular genre or film style, and using that knowledge to create new works of film. For example, filmmaker Agnès Varda conducted artistic research by exploring the feminist movement and incorporating feminist ideas into her films.

When to use Artistic Research

some situations where artistic research may be useful:

Developing new artistic works: Artistic research can be used to inform and inspire the development of new works of art, music, dance, theater, or film.
Exploring new artistic techniques or approaches : Artistic research can be used to explore new techniques or approaches to artistic practice, and to test and refine these approaches through creative experimentation.
Investigating the historical and cultural contexts of artistic practice: Artistic research can be used to investigate the social, cultural, and historical contexts of artistic practice, and to identify the ways in which these contexts shape and influence artistic works.
Evaluating the impact and significance of artistic works : Artistic research can be used to evaluate the impact and significance of artistic works, and to identify the ways in which they contribute to broader cultural, social, and political issues.
Advancing knowledge and understanding in artistic fields: Artistic research can be used to advance knowledge and understanding in artistic fields, and to generate new insights and perspectives on artistic practice.

Purpose of Artistic Research

The purpose of artistic research is to generate new knowledge and understanding through a rigorous and creative investigation of artistic practice. Artistic research aims to push the boundaries of artistic practice and to create new insights and perspectives on artistic works and processes.

Artistic research serves several purposes, including:

Advancing knowledge and understanding in artistic fields: Artistic research can contribute to the development of new knowledge and understanding in artistic fields, and can help to advance the study of artistic practice.
Creating new artistic works and forms: Artistic research can inspire the creation of new artistic works and forms, and can help artists to develop new techniques and approaches to their practice.
Evaluating the impact and significance of artistic works: Artistic research can help to evaluate the impact and significance of artistic works, and to identify their contributions to broader cultural, social, and political issues.
Enhancing interdisciplinary collaboration: Artistic research often involves interdisciplinary collaboration, and can help to foster new connections and collaborations between artists, scholars, and experts in diverse fields.
Challenging assumptions and pushing boundaries: Artistic research can challenge assumptions and push the boundaries of artistic practice, and can help to create new possibilities for artistic expression and exploration.

Characteristics of Artistic Research

Some key characteristics that can be used to describe artistic research:

Creative and interdisciplinary: Artistic research is creative and interdisciplinary, drawing on a wide range of artistic and scholarly disciplines to explore new ideas and approaches to artistic practice.
Experimental and process-oriented : Artistic research is often experimental and process-oriented, involving creative experimentation and exploration of new techniques, forms, and ideas.
Reflection and critical analysis : Artistic research involves reflection and critical analysis of artistic practice, with a focus on exploring the underlying processes, assumptions, and concepts that shape artistic works.
Emphasis on practice-led inquiry : Artistic research is often practice-led, meaning that it involves a close integration of creative practice and research inquiry.
Collaborative and participatory: Artistic research often involves collaboration and participation, with artists, scholars, and experts from diverse fields working together to explore new ideas and approaches to artistic practice.
Contextual and socially engaged : Artistic research is contextual and socially engaged, exploring the ways in which artistic practice is shaped by broader social, cultural, and historical contexts, and engaging with issues of social and political relevance.

Advantages of Artistic Research

Artistic research offers several advantages, including:

Innovation : Artistic research encourages creative experimentation and exploration of new techniques and approaches to artistic practice, leading to innovative and original works of art.
Interdisciplinary collaboration: Artistic research often involves collaboration between artists, scholars, and experts from diverse fields, fostering interdisciplinary exchange and the development of new perspectives and ideas.
Practice-led inquiry : Artistic research is often practice-led, meaning that it involves a close integration of creative practice and research inquiry, leading to a deeper understanding of the creative process and the ways in which it shapes artistic works.
Critical reflection: Artistic research involves critical reflection on artistic practice, encouraging artists to question assumptions and challenge existing norms, leading to new insights and perspectives on artistic works.
Engagement with broader issues : Artistic research is contextual and socially engaged, exploring the ways in which artistic practice is shaped by broader social, cultural, and historical contexts, and engaging with issues of social and political relevance.
Contribution to knowledge : Artistic research contributes to the development of new knowledge and understanding in artistic fields, and can help to advance the study of artistic practice.

Limitations of Artistic Research

Artistic research also has some limitations, including:

Subjectivity : Artistic research is subjective, meaning that it is based on the individual perspectives, experiences, and creative decisions of the artist, which can limit the generalizability and replicability of the research.
Lack of formal methodology : Artistic research often lacks a formal methodology, making it difficult to compare or evaluate different research projects and limiting the reproducibility of results.
Difficulty in measuring outcomes: Artistic research can be difficult to measure and evaluate, as the outcomes are often qualitative and subjective in nature, making it challenging to assess the impact or significance of the research.
Limited funding: Artistic research may face challenges in securing funding, as it is still a relatively new and emerging field, and may not fit within traditional funding structures.
Ethical considerations: Artistic research may raise ethical considerations related to issues such as representation, consent, and the use of human subjects, particularly when working with sensitive or controversial topics.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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The First Six Steps to Research

Define and articulate a research question (formulate a research hypothesis).
Identify possible sources of information in many types and formats.
Judge the scope of the project.
Reevaluate the research question based on the nature and extent of information available and the parameters of the research project.
Select the most appropriate investigative methods (surveys, interviews, experiments) and research tools (periodical indexes, databases, websites).
Plan the research project.

From 15 Steps to Good Research by Georgetown University

Questions to help with steps 1 through 3:

What are the core concepts for your project or research?
What are the core disciplines? Closely related disciplines?
How comprehensive do you need to be in your literature review?
What time span is relevant?
Which individuals and organizations are likely to publish content on your topic and why?

What would be a hypothetical title for your final paper?

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Researching Artworks and Artists
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Researching the Provenance of a Work of Art

The Ryerson & Burnham Libraries collection contains a wide variety of resources that can be used to locate information on artists and their works. Our open shelf collection in the reading room contains reference sources, such as dictionaries, directories, encyclopedias, and indexes. We have strong collections of artist files, auction catalogs, books, exhibition catalogs, journals, and newspapers in the library collection, and the Ryerson and Burnham Archives collections also contain papers for individual artists and arts organizations, as well as a collection of artists’ oral histories.

This research guide provides recommendations for research sources and strategies to locate information on both prominent and obscure artists and their works. Prior to beginning your research, we recommend that you compile as much information about the artist or artwork of interest to you as possible. Do you know the artist’s name, the artwork’s title, the approximate dates the artist worked or the piece was created, or the geographic area where the artist lived or the object was created? If you are working on an artwork in your collection, have you examined it to see whether it contains any signatures or marks, labels, or annotations (you may wish to remove the frame to fully examine the object)? Recording this information and bringing an outline of keywords or research objectives as well as clear, closeup images of any signatures or markings to the library with you will provide you with a strong starting point for your research.

Getting Started

The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries’ catalog will lead you to articles, artist files, books, and exhibition catalogues for an artist. For best results, use the Library Catalog search scope, and enter the artist’s name, last name, first name (example: Monet, Claude). The following resources will also be helpful in learning more about specific artists and their artworks.

Catalogues Raisonnés

Look for a piece in the most comprehensive catalogue of the artist’s known works. Please note these are not available for all artists. The International Foundation for Art Research maintains a free database of published and forthcoming catalogues raisonnés.

In the library catalog, search the Library Catalog scope for: [Artist’s name; Last Name, First Name] – Catalogues raisonnés (example: Hopper, Edward – Catalogues raisonnés).

Artist Files

The Ryerson & Burnham Libraries have over 35,000 artist files, which contain small exhibition catalogs, checklists, clippings, images, and fliers for artists, galleries, museums, and art schools. These are described in the catalog: the location and material type is Pamphlets. See also the New York Public Library’s artists file on microfiche (call number 1990 3).

Biographical Reference Resources

Who’s Who in American Art This subscription resource is also available digitally in the reading room.
Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975
Dictionary of Artists (Bénézit) This subscription resource is also available digitally in the reading room.
Allgemeines Kunstler-Lexikon This subscription resource is also available digitally in the reading room.
Contemporary Artists

Ryerson Index

Look for articles on an artist, particularly if the artist was in the Chicago area and was active in the early to mid-20th century. This includes references to the Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks .

Full Title : I ndex to Art Periodicals (1962)

Signature Directories

If you do not have the name of the work you are researching, but it has a signature, try resources such as these.

American Artists: Signatures & Monograms, 1800-1989
Marks & Monograms: The Decorative Arts, 1880-1960
The Visual Index of Artists’ Signatures & Monograms
Artists’ Monograms & Indiscernible Signatures: An International Directory, 1800-1991

Reproduction Indices

Track down works that reproduce a painting, such as World Painting Index or Art Reproductions .

Art Dictionaries

Art dictionaries are useful for biographies, introductions to periods of art, and the bibliographies that accompany entries; the Grove Dictionary of Art and Oxford Art Online (this subscription resource is available in the reading room) are good examples. Works such as the Dictionary of Art Terms can also be useful for definitions and explanations of terms and periods of art, as well as illustrations and diagrams for entries.

Articles on Art, Artists, and Related Topics

These subscription resources provide citations and some full-text articles on art, artists, and related topics. Unless otherwise noted, they are available onsite at the Art Institute of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago campus. Faculty, students, and staff at the Art Institute of Chicago and School of the Art Institute of Chicago can also access most of these resources from other locations with an ARTIC username and password via the Art, Architecture, and Design Resources Page .

Newspaper Databases

The Libraries subscribe to online regional and national newspaper databases, which can be used to locate biographical or exhibition information.

These resources are accessible in the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries via the Newspapers Resources Page .

Auction Databases

The Libraries subscribe to a number of auction databases, most of which cover auctions from the last 20 years.

These resources are accessible in the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries via the Auction Resources Page.

Researching Artworks in a Museum Collection

Objects currently on display in the Art Institute galleries can usually be found in Collections Online . The record may include an image, information from the wall label, and occasionally an exhibition history and bibliography of titles that mention the artwork. CITI is the museum’s internal collection database, which includes information on all artworks in the Art Institute’s collection. If an item is not on display in the galleries, this may be the best starting point. Please ask at the reference desk for CITI access.

For objects that are on display in other museums and institutions, the subscription ARTstor database, available in the reading room, contains a growing survey of major works of art, as well as specialized image collections.

Search by museum collection, artist, or keyword. ARTstor is available from the Image Databases page .

Catalog of Museum or Department

Consult the catalogs of a museum’s collection or a museum department’s collection. For example: American Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago . You can find these by searching the library catalog for the museum and department name and the term catalogs (for example, Art Institute of Chicago. Department of Textiles — Catalogs).

Beyond the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries

Area Libraries

Check libraries and/or historical societies in the area that the artist was from or was most active for information including newspaper articles and pamphlet files. Try “Find a library near you,” available here: https://www.worldcat.org/libraries .

Chicago Artists’ Archive at Chicago Public Library

This archival collection is available at the Harold Washington Branch of Chicago Public Library (8th floor). Files may contain: resumes, newspaper articles, artists’ books, gallery flyers, videos, press clippings, letters, photographs, some original artwork, and CDs. To find out if a particular artist is included in the collection you can call (312) 747-4300 or consult the list available here: http://www.chipublib.org/fa-chicago-artists-archive/ .

Collections that Have Works by the Artist

Once you discover which museum collections hold pieces by an artist, check with these institutions for information.

Union Catalogs

The Chicago Collections Consortium contains digitized items from the archives and special collections of various Chicago-area institutions, including scrapbooks, photographs, and other printed material for local art-related topics. Access the free online portal here: http://explore.chicagocollections.org .

WorldCat is a catalog of library catalogs worldwide that contains records for libraries’ holdings of books, journals, manuscript collections, newspapers, and digital and audiovisual resources. It is available thorough subscription in the reading room, or in a free version .

Archival Collections

Look for collections of an artist’s papers in library collections around the world search WorldCat or ArchiveGrid .

For American artists, try the Archives of American Art: http://www.aaa.si.edu/ .

Art Information on the Internet

Conduct broad searches for anything on an artist’s name. Using quotation marks around the artist’s name can help limit, as can adding keywords outside the quotation marks.

“Claude Monet”

“Claude Monet” watercolor

“Claude Monet” artist

Searching Google Images, Google Books, and Google Scholar can also be very useful.

The entries in this free online encyclopedia often include bibliographies, references, and links to related entries.

Biographical Information

Consult sites created by museums, libraries, archives, galleries, and others that provide information on artists.

Art in Context

Artcyclopedia

For artists about whom little professional literature is available, try genealogical resources such as census documents, city directories, county histories, and local newspaper collections. Many of these resources are freely accessible online.

ChicagoAncestors

Chronicling America

FamilySearch

Internet Archive

Image Searching

If you have a digital image of the item you are trying to identify, run it through a reverse image search to locate images of similar items on the Internet.

Google Images

Art-Related Services

Appraisal and Conservation

Staff at the Art Institute of Chicago cannot provide authentication or appraisal services, and our conservation staff are not able to accept inquiries on works of art in personal collections. You can locate advice on these topics in our research guide on Appraisal and Conservation Resources for Art .

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RESEARCH GRANTS IN THE ARTS: Program Description

Research Grants in the Arts support research studies that investigate the value and/or impact of the arts, either as individual components of the U.S. arts ecosystem or as they interact with each other and/or with other domains of American life.

With these guidelines, the NEA welcomes research proposals that align with at least one of the priority topics and possible questions within the agency’s FY 2022-2026 research agenda . The priority topics, in brief, are listed below:

What are measurable impacts of the arts on the following outcome areas : health and wellness for individuals; cognition and learning; and U.S. economic growth and innovation? Under what conditions do such impacts occur, through what mechanisms, and for which populations and/or sectors?
In what ways do the arts contribute to the healing and revitalization of communities? What factors mediate these contributions, and for the benefit of which populations? What are common elements of such programs or practices, and what are appropriate measures of success?
What is the state of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the arts? What progress has been made in achieving these outcomes for arts administration, employment, learning, and participation? What are some promising practices and/or replicable strategies in these domains, and what are appropriate measures of success?
How is the U.S. arts ecosystem (e.g., arts organizations and venues, artists and arts workers, and participants and learners) adapting and responding to social, economic, and technological changes and challenges to the sector, including trends accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic? What are promising practices and/or replicable strategies for responding to such forces, for different segments of the arts ecosystem?=

We encourage projects that originate from or are in collaboration with the following constituencies encouraged by White House Executive Orders:

Historically Black Colleges and Universities ,
Tribal Colleges and Universities,
American Indian and Alaska Native tribes,
Predominantly Black Institutions ,
Hispanic Serving Institutions ,
Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, and
Organizations that support the independence and lifelong inclusion of people with disabilities.

At the end of the grant period, Research Grants in the Arts awardees will be required to submit a 20-50-page research paper (Product Requirement); see Research Grants in the Arts Study Findings page for examples of previous grantees' final research products. For more information related to the Product Requirement, see “ Award Administration .”

The selection process for Research Grants in the Arts is rigorous and highly competitive. In recent years, the application success rate has ranged from 31% to 38%. Prior to submitting an application, applicants should consider whether their project is a good fit for the program.

Projects and Research Methods

We welcome applications from diverse research fields (e.g., economics; psychology; education; sociology; medicine, health, and therapy; communications; business administration; urban and regional planning). We expect the funded projects will be diverse in terms of geographical distribution, the artistic and research fields or disciplines involved, and the research topics proposed. We also expect the projects to reflect an array of study designs.

Accordingly, applicants may propose research projects drawing from a range of study designs. In recent years, the NEA has supported a growing cohort of studies that hypothesize a cause-effect relationship between the arts and key outcomes of interest (e.g., in health, education, or the economy). For projects seeking to explore causal claims about the arts , experimental approaches (e.g., randomized controlled trials) are generally preferred. Where experimental approaches are not feasible, then high-quality, quasi-experimental study designs offer an attractive alternative for impact studies about the arts.

In many cases, however, other or different study designs will be preferable. These designs may include, but are not limited to, case studies, complex surveys, mixed methods, and meta-analyses. In particular, we encourage community-based participatory research approaches, where warranted by the research objective. Program evaluations also are eligible for funding.

The NEA research agenda states that, through these awards, the agency will “incentivize the creation of practitioner tools grounded in research.” In keeping with this aim, we especially welcome translational research that moves scientific evidence toward the development, testing, and standardization of new arts-related programs, practices, models, or tools that can be used easily by other practitioners and researchers.

Data Sources and Analysis

Projects supported under this program must include data analysis activities that occur during the period of performance, and can include either primary and/or secondary/archival data sources. We do not fund projects that focus exclusively on data acquisition.

Primary data sources refer to research data or information that did not exist prior to the project and that 1) will be actively collected by the applicant during the period of performance and 2) the costs are included in the project budget.

Secondary/archival data sources refer to research data or information that was or will be actively collected outside of the period of performance and primary data collection is not included in the project budget. Examples of this might include an existing dataset or archival information that applicants plan to analyze under an NEA award.

Data analysis may include quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed-method approaches. Data sources may include, but are not limited to, surveys, censuses, biological or medical experiments, observations, interviews, focus groups, social media activity, administrative data, and transactional/financial data. Other examples of data sources include archived materials such as written documents, audio/video recordings, or photographs and images.

We welcome the use of data in both the public and private domain, including commercial and/or administrative data sources. Visit the NEA website for a list of publicly available datasets that include arts-related variables. Some of these datasets are also available through the NEA’s public data repository: the National Archive of Data on Arts & Culture (NADAC).

See “Responsible Conduct of Research” for requirements related to primary data collected from human subjects.

We do not fund

Projects that do not include a focus on a priority topic outlined in the NEA’s research agenda.
Projects that focus exclusively on data acquisition.
Projects that do not include data analysis.
Projects that focus exclusively on conducting a literature review.
Project activities that include the creation and/or installation of public art as part of the proposed project activities and budget. Public art refers to the commissioning and installation of artwork in public spaces, such as temporary or permanent outdoor furnishings (e.g., benches or market structures), or other artwork such as a sculpture or mural that is temporarily or permanently installed in public spaces. These types of projects are funded through our other grant programs, including Grants for Arts Projects , Challenge America , and Our Town .
Seasonal or general operating support.
Costs of physical construction or renovation, or the purchase costs of facilities or land.

See the General Terms and Conditions for Grants and Cooperative Agreements to Organizations for more information on unallowable costs and activities.

Recommended Partnerships

Although not required to do so, applicants are strongly encouraged to include project teams that enable substantial input and participation from arts practitioners and researchers/evaluators. If applicants do not already have research staff in their organizations, they are strongly encouraged to collaborate with other organizations, entities, or individuals who will be able to support the technical requirements of the research project. Applicants that do not have an arts practitioner serving on the project are strongly encouraged to collaborate with other organizations, entities, or individuals to provide any artistic or arts field perspectives as needed.

Award Information

We anticipate awarding 10 to 20 grants, based on the availability of funding.

Grants will range from $20,000 to $100,000.

For projects that will involve minimal or no primary data collection as part of the project budget, we anticipate making awards in the $20,000-$50,000 range. Projects that include primary data collection as a robust component of the project are eligible for awards between $20,000 and $100,000.
For requests between $50,000 and $100,000, priority will be given to projects that present theory-driven and evidence-based research questions and methodologies.

We will award very few grants at or above the $50,000 level; we anticipate these projects to be capable of significant scale and impact.

Grants cannot exceed 50% of the total cost of the project. All grants require a nonfederal cost share/match of at least 1 to 1. These cost share/matching funds may be all cash or a combination of cash and in-kind contributions, and can include federally-negotiated indirect costs. You may include in your Project Budget cost share/matching funds that are proposed but not yet committed at the time of the application deadline.

In developing an application, we urge applicants to consider the grant award levels of recent awards and to request a realistic grant amount. Applicants should review the lists of grants on our website to see recent grant award levels and project types.

Applicants whose projects are recommended for less than the requested funding amount will have the opportunity to revise the project budget to reflect any necessary changes to the project, based on the recommended funding amount.

We reserve the right to limit our support of a project to a particular phase(s) or cost(s). All costs included in your Project Budget must be incurred during your period of performance. Costs associated with other federal funds, whether direct or indirect (e.g., flow down through a state arts agency), cannot be included in your Project Budget. No pre-award costs are allowable in the Project Budget. Costs incurred before the earliest project start date of January 1, 2025, cannot be included in your budget or cost share/match.

All applications submitted and grants made in response to these guidelines are subject to the NEA’s grant regulations and terms and conditions.

Period of Performance

Our support of a project may start on or after January 1, 2025. Grants generally may cover a period of performance of up to three years. Projects that extend beyond one year may be required to submit an annual progress report, and must include proof of updated ethics training on human subjects research protections and Institutional Review Board (IRB) materials as necessary. See “ Responsible Conduct of Research ” for requirements related to data collected from human subjects.

A grantee may not receive more than one NEA grant for the same activities or costs during the same period of performance.

Applicant Eligibility

The lead applicant organization must be a:

Nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3), U.S. organization;
Unit of state or local government; or
Federally recognized tribal communities or tribe.

Colleges and universities that fall under one of these three categories may serve as the lead applicant organization.

For projects that involve multiple organizations, one organization that meets the eligibility requirements below must act as the official applicant, submit the application, and assume full responsibility for the grant. Partnering organizations are not required to meet the eligibility requirements below.

To be eligible as the lead applicant, the organization must :

Meet the NEA’s " Legal Requirements ," including nonprofit, tax-exempt status at the time of application. (All organizations must apply directly on their own behalf. Applications through a fiscal sponsor/agent are not allowed. See more information on fiscal sponsors/agents .)
Have completed a three-year history of operations prior to the application deadline.

All applicants must have a Unique Entity Identifier (UEI), be registered with the System for Award Management (SAM, www.sam.gov ), and maintain an active SAM.gov registration from the time of application throughout the life of the award, should a grant be made.

The following are not eligible to apply as the lead applicant organization:

The designated 50 state and six jurisdictional arts agencies (SAAs) and their regional arts organizations (RAOs). SAAs and RAOs may serve as partners in projects. However, they may not receive NEA funds (except as provided through their designated grant programs), and SAA/RAO costs may not be included as part of the required cost share/match. SAAs and RAOs are eligible to apply for NEA funds through the Partnership Agreements guidelines.
An organization whose primary purpose is to channel resources (financial, human, or other) to an affiliated organization if the affiliated organization also submits its own application. This prohibition applies even if each organization has its own 501(c)(3) status. For example, the "Friends of ABC Museum" may not apply if the ABC Museum applies.

Late, ineligible, and incomplete applications will not be reviewed.

Competition for Research Grants in the Arts is extremely rigorous. It is expected that an applicant organization selected to receive an award will complete the research project. We will not transfer the award to another organization.

Application Limits

An organization may submit more than one application under these Research Grants in the Arts guidelines. In each case, the request must be for a distinctly different project . However, an organization will not receive more than one Research Grants in the Arts award in any given cycle.
Applicants to the Research Grants in the Arts program may apply to other NEA funding opportunities, within the same fiscal year. Each application must be for a distinctly different project.

Application Review

Review criteria.

Applications will be reviewed on the basis of agency-wide criteria of artistic excellence and artistic merit . For the Research Awards programs, artistic excellence and artistic merit can be considered as research excellence and research merit, respectively, as they relate to the bullets below.

The following are considered during the review of applications:

Artistic Excellence of the Project:

Is the research plan clear and effective? This includes the conceptual framework, research design, description of any arts program or intervention being studied, sampling techniques and/or data sources, and the proposed analytical methods, in addition to the relationship of these elements to the proposed research questions. This also includes the appropriateness of the research questions to the Research Grants in the Arts program.
Is there a sufficient evidence base for the research plan? This includes evidence that the project is informed by a literature review and/or citations of previous work or research (either published or unpublished) that support the conceptual framework and proposed research plan (including the study design and analytical methods).
Are the organization, its partners, and project personnel qualified to execute the research plan? This includes credentials and past accomplishments in conducting research of the type proposed. As appropriate, discussion of planned or actual ethics training on human subjects research protections for relevant personnel, and the project’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) plans and/or status. This also includes the appropriateness of the research and/or artistic disciplines represented on the project team.
Does the project include effective strategies, including quality control measures, to document progress and success during the period of performance? This includes any milestones that the organization plans to achieve during the project as well as beyond the life of the grant. This also includes any processes that ensure fidelity of the data collection/analysis and program/therapy implementation through routine monitoring and oversight.
Have the organization and partners devoted adequate resources to execute the entire project? This includes appropriateness of the budget, other resources, and the degree of involvement by project personnel.

Artistic Merit of the Project:

Likely to yield results that are generalizable, even for discrete populations or practitioner groups.
Likely to spur innovation in arts-related research, policy, or practice—e.g., through the development, testing, and standardization of models, tools, or evidence-based guides.
Likely to allow more than one field, sector, or population subgroup to benefit from arts-related research.
Where appropriate, likely to yield results benefiting historically underserved groups/communities, including those for whom there are limited opportunities to experience the arts and arts-related benefits.
Does the project include effective strategies to promote and disseminate the research results, products, and data? This includes distribution strategies to make the research findings, products, and data accessible to the public and to other researchers and practitioners, beyond the materials that would be posted to the NEA’s website. This also may include a record of past accomplishments in publishing or distributing research results, and the data management plan, as appropriate.

What Happens to Your Application

After processing by our staff, applications are reviewed, in closed session by interdisciplinary research and evaluation advisory panelists. Each panel comprises a diverse group of arts-research experts and other individuals, including at least one knowledgeable layperson. Panels are convened remotely. Panel membership changes regularly. The panel recommends the projects to be supported, and the staff reconciles panel recommendations with the funds that are available. These recommendations are forwarded to the National Council on the Arts, where they are reviewed in an open, public session.

The Council makes recommendations to the Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Chair reviews the recommendations for grants in all funding categories and makes the final decision on all grant awards. Applicants are then notified of funding decisions. It is anticipated that the NEA will notify applicants of award or rejection in November 2024. After notification, applicants with questions may contact the staff.

Risk Assessment: All recommended applications undergo a review to evaluate risk posed by the applicant organization prior to making a federal award. The review may include past performance on grants and/or cooperative agreements, meeting reporting deadlines, compliance with terms and conditions, audit findings, etc.

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Why electronic arts (ea) is a top growth stock for the long-term.

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Electronic Arts (EA)

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See related studies The Arts Education Partnership has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Education since 1995 and is administered by Education Commission of the States.

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Arts flourish in america's top rural counties: a data-driven exploration, arts vibrancy in rural communities is achieved through collective action, our latest findings, help empower the nonprofit arts and cultural sector.

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Photo Credits: Ananya Dance Theatre, Minneapolis, MN, photo by Jim Smith. Philadelphia Young Playwrights, Philadelphia, PA, photo by Yuan Liu. Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA, photo by Ryan Gobuty/Gensler. Portland Opera, Big Night Concert (2017), photo by Cory Weaver. Battery Dance, New York, NY, photo by Darial Sneed.

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Karine Dupre named associate dean of research and creative scholarship for College of Architecture, Arts, and Design

Krista Timney

20 Aug 2024

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Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture, Arts, and Design gained an “impact champion” when Professor Karine Dupre began her new appointment as associate dean of research and creative scholarship on Aug. 1.

An architect and urban designer, Dupre is coming to Blacksburg from Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, where her most recent leadership position was that of impact champion. In this role, Dupre provided support and guidance to researchers across the university, while leading by example through her own achievements and funded projects.

In her new role for the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design, Dupre is charged with realizing a visionary research strategy that advances and is in sync with the university’s mission and priorities. Additional key responsibilities include promoting interdisciplinary collaboration on campus and beyond, and expanding the college’s funded research projects, creative scholarship efforts, and sponsored projects.

“I am really excited about the array of talent constituting the College of Architecture, Arts, and Design and am looking forward to working collaboratively to promote the research and creative scholarship culture both inside and outside the college,” said Dupre. “The influence of creative disciplines on the wellbeing and development of our communities is often underestimated, and this new role will provide the opportunity to facilitate and demonstrate the leadership of the college in this area.”

Dupre is expecting a learning curve for both herself and the college community, but she plans to rely on existing expertise and learn from colleagues, while also bringing her own brand of “strategic and agile thinking that can benefit the college and empower its academics.”

Dean Lu Liu said he believes Dupre is a leader who will have an immediate impact on research activities in the college, especially in relation to the incoming cohort of 28 new faculty hires, for whom she will be a guide and mentor.

“We are committed to advancing faculty research and creative scholarship, and we need a leader who will encourage and nurture these efforts while thriving in the ‘start up’ environment of the college,” said Liu. “The spirit of creativity and entrepreneurship go hand in hand, and we welcome new collaborative ventures between our faculty and students, as well as those involving firms and industry partners that will help us build better communities.”

Dupre has held a variety of leadership positions in academic administration and research at Griffith University. She was a cluster leader for the Griffith Institute for Tourism and the higher degree research convener for the School of Engineering and Built Environment. She also served as director of the Bachelor of Architectural Design Program and acting head of the Architecture Program.

Prior to her tenure at Griffith University, Dupre was the head of the School of Architecture and the director of the Bachelor of Architecture Program at the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Strasbourg, France.

As a researcher, Dupre focuses on the design processes that can make cities and communities more resilient and sustainable. She is an expert on social design and live projects, which allow teams of students to work with clients and communities to complete projects in real-time, managing constraints like budgets, time, and people. Above all, her work is built upon and emphasizes collaboration and shared creativity.

Dupre earned a Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Architecture from Ecole d'Architecture de Paris Charenton and a Research Master in history and anthropology from the University Antilles-Guyane (UAG), France. She has also earned a Ph.D. in urban planning and design from Tampere Technical University in Finland and a Ph.D. in modern history from UAG.

For the last year, Michael Borowski , associate professor in the School of Visual Arts , has served as the interim dean for the college. “We are thankful that Michael was able to step into the position and be a visible presence and advocate for our research efforts, most notably by chairing a task force that developed metrics for measuring significant faculty achievements in creative scholarship,” said Liu.

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Trapped in her web: integrative biology researcher receives funds for spider cannibalism research.

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Media Contact: Elizabeth Gosney | CAS Marketing and Communications Manager | 405-744-7497 | [email protected]

Dr. Shawn Wilder, an associate professor in Oklahoma State University’s Department of Integrative Biology, was awarded $541,373 from the National Science Foundation for his project "Testing How Nutrients Affect Offspring Traits Using Cannibalism as a Model System."

Wilder and his Ph.D. student, Colton Herzog, will use the NSF funds to advance knowledge of spider species that engage in sexual cannibalism, which is when the female eats the male before, during or after mating.

“ Studies have shown that females benefit from eating the male, including in some spiders where the male is very small compared to the female,” Wilder said. “This implies that there’s some nutrient in the male body that can increase female fitness when consumed at low concentrations, such as a micronutrient or other type of dietary essential nutrient.

“My students and I will be conducting experiments to identify which chemicals in the male body are responsible for the benefits of sexual cannibalism to females.”

Wilder said that by further developing an understanding of these nutrients, comparisons could be made to other animals.

“Nutrition can be complex, as there are many potential chemicals that could affect the fitness of animals,” Wilder said. “The goal of this study is to identify which micronutrients or dietary essential nutrients contribute to offspring success in spiders, with the hope that some of these chemicals are also beneficial to other animals.”

As the duo builds their web of researchers, Wilder is focused on giving students unique experiences that will benefit their academic and professional careers.

“This research will provide an opportunity to train undergraduate and graduate students in research,” Wilder said. “In addition, this work will provide public outreach events about spiders to educate the public about the importance of spiders in ecosystems and train students in how to effectively run those public outreach events.”

Herzog said what was initially a side project for him and Wilder has come full circle.

“ Now that a large grant for this project has been secured, we can investigate if any biomolecules are responsible for sexual cannibalism,” Herzog said. “Overall, having funding opens a door up for the different type of nutrients we can investigate, and their effects — if any — in sexual cannibalism.

“For me personally, I'm most excited to begin utilizing nutritional ecology to address these advanced questions. I think in nature, animal behaviors that we may view as odd could have a nutritional reason behind it, and that is where Shawn and I come in.”

To learn more about Wilder’s research, visit his experts page .

Story By: Erin Weaver, CAS Communications Coordinator | [email protected]

Archive of Contemporary Art in Krasnodar Krai

The Archive of Contemporary Art in Krasnodar Krai was founded in Krasnodar in 2019 by the artists of ZIP Group (Evegny Rimkevich, Vasily Subbotin, Stepan Subbotin) and the researchers and curators Elena Ishchenko and Marianna Kruchinski.

The archive team aims to collect and systematize information about the processes linked to the development of contemporary art in the region since the 1970s. Most of the material covers the period from 2000 to 2020.

The archive is constructed around a broad range of personalities, starting with Evgeny Tsei, who is considered the main representative of Krasnodar nonconformism, and ending with young artists. The collection includes biographical information, portfolios, information about exhibitions, press releases, photographs, and videos. The majority of the material is digital copies, with the originals remaining with the artists.

The team also collects and systematizes information about institutions whose activities aim to develop the artistic environment in the region. This part of the archive concerns the work of state, independent, and self‑organized initiatives, such as Krasnodar Institute of Contemporary Art (KICA), Typography Center for Contemporary Art, and Larina Gallery.

The materials cover Krasnodar, Novorossiisk, Gelendzhik, Anapa, Armavir, Kropotkin, the village of Golubitskaya, and other cities, including some outside Russia, that are connected to the activities of the people in the archive.

In 2020, a separate sub‑archive was created based on the collection of researcher Tatyana Ukolova, which focuses on contemporary art in Sochi.

Until 2022, the archive was based at the Typography Center for Contemporary Art.

Krasnodar: Lines on a Flat Surface. The History of KISI, exhibition view, Fabrika Center for Creative Industries, Moscow, 2013. Courtesy of ZIP Group

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Opinion Guest Essay

How Psychedelic Research Got High on Its Own Supply

Credit... Illustration by Pablo Delcan; images by londoneye and SimoneN/Getty Images

Supported by

By Caty Enders

Ms. Enders is a science writer.

Aug. 23, 2024

T hings weren’t supposed to go this way. The drug company Lykos Therapeutics had spent much of this year expecting to vault to meteoric heights. It had sent an application to the Food and Drug Administration seeking approval to use MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. Lykos expected F.D.A. approval; it was banking on it.

And then on Aug. 9, the F.D.A.’s decision came through: rejection. It was the capstone to months of increasingly loud concerns being voiced over the quality of Lykos’s clinical trials. And in the wake of the F.D.A. decision, the journal Psychopharmacology retracted three papers related to research on MDMA, citing “ unethical conduct ,” an apparent reference to allegations of sexual abuse on the part of an unlicensed therapist at one of the trial sites. Several of the authors of the retracted papers were affiliated with Lykos.

It is a shocking decrescendo for a drug that had been promoted for years as best positioned to lead a psychedelic mental health revolution. The F.D.A.’s rejection signals greater uncertainty for the future of psychedelic medicine. And it will take more than just additional clinical trials for advocates to get back on track — it might require changing the culture of the research community from within.

First synthesized by the drug company Merck in 1912, MDMA, also known as the party drug Ecstasy or molly, has both stimulant and hallucinogenic properties. It also has the ability to foster feelings of connectedness and to seemingly dissolve a person’s mental boundaries, which advocates say can help patients revisit their trauma more comfortably during psychotherapy sessions in order to heal from it. Lykos has spent years conducting clinical trials testing whether MDMA-assisted psychotherapy could alleviate the symptoms of PTSD. Its most recent drug trial showed that more than 86 percent of people treated had a measurable reduction in symptom severity. Even more impressive, the effect seemed to be lasting. Had the therapy been approved, it would have become the first new treatment for PTSD in decades, and would have handed over administration and control of prescription MDMA to Lykos for at least five years.

More broadly, proponents hoped a green light from the F.D.A. would open the door to regulatory approval for other psychedelics in mental health treatment, an area of medicine that has been desperate for innovation. Mental health disorders are surging , with rates of depression, anxiety and PTSD all on the rise, and current drugs don’t work terribly well. The majority of patients diagnosed with depression do not benefit from the first medications they are given. Conditions like PTSD are challenging to treat, and veterans groups have been especially supportive of the potential for psychedelics to address the mental trauma suffered during combat. Amid growing enthusiasm, drug companies, clinicians and patients had enormous hope that psychedelics could relieve the symptoms of millions.

But that hope began to fray in June, when an advisory panel to the F.D.A. voted almost unanimously against recommending Lykos’s MDMA treatment. With what seemed to be audible irritation, the chair of the F.D.A. review panel, Dr. Rajesh Narendran, called Lykos’s study so poorly conducted as to be “meaningless,” adding that he was “not convinced at all” that MDMA could effectively treat PTSD.

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From Baseball to Ancient Italy: How Former Philadelphia Phillies Pitcher Brad Lidge Came to Publish Research with Classics Professor Anthony Tuck

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer profiles former closing pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies Brad Lidge in his pursuit of a doctorate in archaeology. Along the way, he met and published research with Anthony Tuck, professor of classics and director of excavations at Poggio Civitate (Murlo), an Etruscan site dating to the 8th to 6th centuries BCE.

Following his retirement from baseball, Lidge took his lifelong passion for history and turned it into a master’s degree in ancient Roman archaeology, which he earned from the University of Leicester in 2017. Now, he’s getting ready to pursue his PhD and he knows exactly what he hopes to pursue.

“Etruscan sigla, and a more generalized archaeology of ancient Italy,” Lidge said in the article . “I’m trying to find a way to sync those two topics together.”

The Etruscans were an indigenous people who lived in the Tuscany region of Italy. Lidge focuses on the period from 800 B.C. to 500 B.C. “Sigla” were the symbols the Etruscan people used to communicate. It's this topic that brought him together with Tuck.

Together, the article notes, Tuck and Lidge examined symbols carved into pottery and roof tiles, and found that while many symbols were carved in tombs, they were also inscribed at an ancient Etruscan workshop in Murlo. They concluded these symbols were likely meant to quantify materials used at the workshop.

“For me, it’s amazing to kind of know that that is something that’s still out there that we don’t really know about,” Lidge said. “And then specifically, these symbols are really mysterious because they’re not really documented at all. It’s been really, really exciting to get to understand something like that in much more depth than really anything I had done in the past.”

Read the full article.

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Krasnodar State University of Arts and Culture

Ulitsa 40-Letiya Pobedy, 33, Krasnodar, Krasnodar Krai, Russia, 350072

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Krasnodar State University of Culture and Arts — public university. It is located in Krasnodar, Russia. Krasnodar State University of Culture and Arts works in several scientific areas and is waiting for new students. The university campus is located in Krasnodar. KGIK today Krasnodar State Institute of Culture - e is the leading complex of South Russia to train specialists in the sphere of culture and art, one of the largest research centers in the field of cultural studies, national artistic and socio-cultural activities. The Institute conducted training on 10 specialties of secondary vocational education, 38 areas of undergraduate, nine specialty programs, 19 master's directions, 10 postgraduate programs, nine - post-graduate course. The Institute of over 3,700 students and over 250 teachers.

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School Director: Sergei Semenovich Zengin

Population: 2000

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+78612577632

[email protected]

https://kgik1966.ru/

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44 Facts About Krasnodar

Written by Margo Rhone

Modified & Updated: 25 Jun 2024

Reviewed by Sherman Smith

Krasnodar is a vibrant and fascinating city located in the southern part of Russia. Known for its rich history, diverse culture, and stunning natural landscapes, Krasnodar offers an array of attractions and experiences for visitors to enjoy. From its iconic architecture to its delicious cuisine, this city truly has something for everyone.

In this article, we will explore 44 intriguing facts about Krasnodar. Whether you’re planning a trip to this dynamic city or simply want to learn more about it, you’ll find plenty of interesting tidbits to satisfy your curiosity. So, let’s dive in and uncover the hidden gems of Krasnodar!

Key Takeaways:

Krasnodar, the 16th largest city in Russia, offers a warm climate, vibrant culinary scene, and rich cultural heritage, making it a beautiful gift for visitors and residents alike.
With its diverse culture, thriving community, and rich history, Krasnodar provides something for everyone to enjoy, from outdoor activities to vibrant cultural events.

Krasnodar is the 16th largest city in Russia.

Located in the southern part of the country, Krasnodar occupies an area of about 300 square kilometers.

The city’s name translates to “beautiful gift” in Russian.

Krasnodar was named by Catherine the Great in 1794, who was impressed by the natural beauty of the region.

Krasnodar is the capital of Krasnodar Krai.

Krasnodar Krai is a federal subject of Russia , and Krasnodar serves as its administrative center.

The city is known for its warm climate.

Krasnodar experiences hot summers with temperatures reaching up to 35°C (95°F) and mild winters with temperatures rarely dropping below freezing.

Krasnodar is a major transportation hub.

The city is well-connected by air, rail, and road networks, making it a crucial transportation node in southern Russia.

Krasnodar is home to the popular FC Krasnodar football team.

FC Krasnodar competes in the Russian Premier League and has gained a significant following in the region.

The city is known for its vibrant culinary scene.

Krasnodar offers a wide variety of restaurants, cafes, and street food stalls serving both traditional Russian cuisine and international dishes.

Krasnodar is a major agricultural center.

The fertile land surrounding the city is ideal for agriculture, and Krasnodar is known for its production of grains, fruits, and vegetables.

Krasnodar is home to the Kuban River.

The Kuban River flows through the city, providing a picturesque backdrop and recreational opportunities for residents and visitors.

Krasnodar has a rich cultural heritage.

The city boasts numerous museums, theaters, and art galleries, showcasing the history and artistic talent of the region.

The famous artist Ivan Shishkin was born in Krasnodar.

Ivan Shishkin is one of Russia’s most renowned landscape painters and is known for his realistic and detailed depictions of nature.

Krasnodar is known for its annual Krasnodar Jazz Festival.

The Krasnodar Jazz Festival attracts jazz musicians and enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing both local talents and international artists.

The city is a cultural melting pot.

Krasnodar is home to people of various ethnicities, contributing to its diverse cultural landscape.

Krasnodar is famous for its traditional Cossack culture.

The Cossacks have a strong presence in Krasnodar, and their customs, dances, and music are celebrated throughout the city.

Krasnodar is a popular destination for outdoor activities.

The surrounding area offers opportunities for hiking, camping, and exploring the beautiful nature reserves and national parks.

The city is a center for higher education.

Krasnodar is home to several universities and colleges, attracting students from all over Russia and abroad.

Krasnodar has a thriving business and entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The city has experienced significant economic growth, with a range of industries contributing to its success.

Krasnodar has a bustling nightlife scene.

There are numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues where locals and visitors can enjoy music, dancing, and socializing.

Krasnodar hosts the annual Krasnodar International Film Festival.

The film festival showcases local and international films, attracting filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts.

The city has a well-developed public transportation system.

Krasnodar offers a network of buses, trams, and trolleybuses, making it convenient for residents and tourists to get around.

Krasnodar is home to the largest open-air market in southern Russia.

The central market, known as “Tsentralniy Rynok,” offers a wide variety of fresh produce, clothing, and other goods.

The city has hosted international sports events.

Krasnodar has been a host city for major events such as the FIFA World Cup and the European Athletics Championships.

Krasnodar is a center for healthcare and medical research.

The city is home to state-of-the-art medical facilities and renowned research institutes .

Krasnodar is known for its beautiful parks and gardens.

The city boasts numerous green spaces where residents can relax, exercise, and enjoy nature.

Krasnodar is experiencing rapid urban development.

The city’s skyline is continuously evolving with the construction of new residential and commercial buildings.

The city has a rich history dating back to ancient times.

Archaeological discoveries in the region have revealed traces of early civilizations that once thrived in Krasnodar.

Krasnodar is a city of sports enthusiasts.

From football and basketball to martial arts and water sports, Krasnodar offers a wide range of sporting activities and facilities.

The city is known for its warm and welcoming locals.

Krasnodar residents are known for their hospitality and friendly nature.

Krasnodar has a vibrant music scene.

The city hosts music festivals and concerts throughout the year, showcasing a variety of genres and talents.

Krasnodar has a developed network of bike lanes.

Cycling enthusiasts can explore the city and its surroundings using the extensive bike paths available.

Krasnodar has a rich tradition of folk dances and music.

Traditional dance groups and music ensembles perform regularly, preserving the cultural heritage of the region.

The city has a thriving technology sector.

Krasnodar is home to numerous tech startups and companies driving innovation in various fields.

Krasnodar is famous for its vibrant food markets.

Locals and tourists flock to the markets to find fresh produce, local delicacies, and traditional Russian ingredients.

Krasnodar has a strong sense of community.

Residents actively engage in volunteer work and community initiatives, fostering a close-knit and supportive environment.

The city has a rich architectural heritage.

From historical buildings to modern structures, Krasnodar showcases a blend of architectural styles.

Krasnodar is a gateway to the Black Sea coast.

The city’s proximity to popular coastal destinations makes it an ideal starting point for beach getaways.

Krasnodar celebrates various cultural festivals throughout the year.

The city embraces diversity by hosting festivals that showcase the traditions and customs of different ethnic groups.

Krasnodar has a well-established theater scene.

From classical plays to contemporary performances, theater enthusiasts can enjoy a range of productions in the city.

The city is known for its innovative urban planning.

Krasnodar has implemented modern urban planning principles to create livable and sustainable neighborhoods.

Krasnodar has a strong sense of environmental awareness.

Efforts are made to preserve the natural beauty of the region and promote eco-friendly practices within the city.

The city is home to the Kuban State University.

Kuban State University is one of the oldest and most prestigious educational institutions in southern Russia.

Krasnodar is a center for sports medicine.

The city offers state-of-the-art medical facilities and professionals specialized in sports-related injuries and rehabilitation.

Krasnodar has a well-developed retail sector.

From shopping malls to boutique stores, residents and visitors have access to a wide variety of retail options.

Krasnodar is known for its vibrant cultural events.

Throughout the year, the city hosts festivals, concerts, and exhibitions that showcase the creative talents of its residents.

As you can see, Krasnodar is a city with a rich history, diverse culture, and thriving community. From its warm climate to its vibrant culinary scene, there is something for everyone to enjoy in this beautiful gift of a city.

In conclusion, Krasnodar is a vibrant city that offers a wealth of history, culture, and natural beauty. With its rich architectural heritage, delicious cuisine, and friendly locals, it is no wonder that Krasnodar is a popular destination for travelers from all over the world. Whether you are interested in exploring the city’s museums and art galleries, experiencing its lively nightlife, or simply indulging in its delicious local dishes, Krasnodar has something for everyone. So, if you are looking for an exciting and memorable travel experience, be sure to add Krasnodar to your bucket list.

1. What is the best time to visit Krasnodar?

The best time to visit Krasnodar is during the spring and autumn seasons when the weather is pleasant and mild. Summers can be quite hot and humid, while winters are cold with occasional snowfall.

2. How can I reach Krasnodar?

Krasnodar is well-connected by air, rail, and road. The city has an international airport, and there are regular flights from major cities in Russia and Europe. Additionally, there are train and bus services available for travelers.

3. Are there any must-visit attractions in Krasnodar?

Yes, there are several must-visit attractions in Krasnodar. Some of the popular ones include the Kuban State University Botanical Garden, Krasnodar Regional Art Museum, Red Street, and the Krasnodar Safari Park.

4. Is it safe to travel to Krasnodar?

Yes, Krasnodar is generally a safe city to visit. However, it is always recommended to take normal precautions and be aware of your surroundings, especially in crowded areas.

5. What is the local cuisine like in Krasnodar?

The local cuisine in Krasnodar is diverse and delicious. Some popular dishes include Kuban-style barbecued meats, borscht ( beetroot soup), pirozhki (stuffed pastries), and traditional Russian desserts like blini (thin pancakes) and medovik (honey cake).

6. Are there any outdoor activities to do in Krasnodar?

Yes, there are plenty of outdoor activities to enjoy in Krasnodar. You can visit the beautiful parks and gardens, go hiking in the nearby mountains, or explore the stunning countryside on a bike tour.

7. Can I take day trips from Krasnodar?

Absolutely! Krasnodar is a great base for day trips to nearby attractions such as the Black Sea coast, the picturesque town of Gelendzhik, and the historic city of Anapa.

8. Is English widely spoken in Krasnodar?

While English is not widely spoken, you can still manage to communicate with basic English in major tourist areas. Having a few basic Russian phrases handy can also be helpful.

Krasnodar's vibrant sports scene is just one facet of this captivating city. Football enthusiasts will enjoy learning more about FC Krasnodar's impressive history and accomplishments . Kuban Krasnodar, another prominent local club , has its own intriguing tale to tell. For those curious about the visionary behind Krasnodar's transformation, Sergey Galitsky's fascinating story is a must-read.

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