Exhibition
Exhibition at the Center for Creative Photography featured projects, workshop series and gallery talks elucidating the capacity of Arts Research to integrate into a wide range of knowledge domains, connecting disciplines, engaging with community, and creating meaning and understanding in profound and unforeseeable ways.
In five projects were funded the Arizona Institute for Resilience through Arts|Humanites|Resilience grants, arts researchers engaged: high school students in the borderlands through creative writing and visual art; healthcare leaders on the San Carlos Apache reservation through film making; generations of residents of Tucson’s Southside through photography, video, and archiving; art undergraduates and environmental scientists at Biosphere2 through animation; and people from many communities in Tucson through free public workshops.
The exhibition was made possible by an Arts Integration planning grant awarded to Ellen McMahon, Associate Dean for Research, College of Fine Arts and Jennifer Fields, Director of the Office of Societal Impact.
Arizona Alumni Magazine article: Resilience Blooms in the Desert
Projects
- America’s Health: Welcome to the Game
- The Nature of Change: Experiments in Societal Transformation Through Environmental Art in Tucson and the Sonoran Desert
- Southwest Field Studies in Writing
- Documenting Resilience in Tucson’s Southside
- Science-in-Motion
- 100-Year Photography: From Today to the Future
- Dear Body of Water: A Poetic Water-Harvesting Project
Projects represent:
- Five colleges: Fine Arts, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Humanities, Science, and Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture
- Seven departments and schools: Visual Art; Theatre, Film & Television; Ecology and Environmental Biology; English; Creative Writing; Public Applied Humanities; and Plant Sciences
- Four external partners: Jonathan Keats, Francisco Cantú, Christine Harland, and Selina Barajas
- Three community organizations: Borderlands Restoration Network, El Pueblo Neighborhood Center, and Sunnyside Foundation
- Three Research Centers/Institutes/Engagement Units: Biosphere 2, Tumamoc Hill, and Center for Creative Photography
Workshops
Three workshops were designed and led by visiting artist Jonathon Keats in response to conversations with Ellen McMahon and leadership in Research Innovation Impact (RII) Centers and Institutes. They brought people together from all corners of the university to the exhibition space to make things and reflect together, seeding new communities of interdisciplinary curiosity and understanding. In “ORIGINS: Fossils for Possible Futures,” participants created fossils speculatively representing organisms from imagined worlds. In “FUTURES: Sculpting the Unknown,” participants explored a novel methodology for transdisciplinary exchange using sculpture as a common language for playful intellectual exploration. In “HETEROGENEITY: The Values of Nature,” participants explored lessons in righteousness to be learned from creatures of the Sonoran Desert, providing a space for creative expression of the more-than-humane.
All of the art works were produced in the workshops were included in the exhibition in addition to Century Cameras made in a related workshop on Tumamaoc Hill.
Research Centers/Institutes consulted included: Arizona Astrobiology Center, Arizona Institute for Resilience, Arizona Space Institute, Bio5 Institute, Biosphere 2, Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, Data Science Institute, France- Arizona Institute for Global Grand Challenges, Institute for Computation & Data- Enabled Insight, and Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. We also met with leadership in: the Lab for Tree-Ring Research, the Santa Rita Experimental Range, UITS, DataVis and the UA Sky School.
Assessment
Qualitative Assessment included: 1) a survey of Gallery Talk/ Exhibition attendees; 2) a focus group of exhibitors (those who worked on funded projects); and 3) a focus group of workshop participants. Results demonstrate how practice-based arts research: catalyzes multidisciplinary collaborative teams; builds morale and cross campus connections; introduces alternative ways of knowing; and engages meaningfully with Southern Arizona communities.
Comments by Participants:
I feel like I sort of you all helped me, like, Get out of my little linear box.
I really like how we have the rotating collaborative perspectives that invites us to switch. You know, where we sit and kind of gather different perspectives from people or from different disciplines.
I was really, really nervous. But I had so much fun, I thought it was a wonderful experience, it was so cool to be around all these really different creative people who, you know, are doing amazing research themselves.
The effect of the workshop is very cutting-edge exploration, from my point of view. First, the content of the workshop is very philosophical and poetic, and people of different identities participate in handicraft production on the spot, regardless of whether they have art skills, so that everyone can contact art in their own cognition and find an energy outlet that can be released. Second, the creation of the workshop has a variety of judging criteria. After each person’s production, the opinions can be cross-evaluated and revised, which is in line with today’s mediated art scene and activates new thinking about art forms.
I could talk for a long time about how art could influence and support science innovation, like very obviously to me, that kind of fact that improves discovery and innovations and what we do with those.
I think really immediately it could help science, Western science folks, communicate what they’re doing so much better with the communities they work with, you know, policymakers, people, children, who they think want maybe to be science people.
I think that there’s a really interesting model that I’m not entirely sure that I know how to articulate I’m not entirely sure how it came about. But it did and it was magical, how it came about, where I felt really, like I could fully engage with all of you and with everyone else in this larger cohort on building work that was meaningful within the context of Tucson within the context of the University of Arizona, but where it didn’t need to be constructed according to a given curriculum or career path, or a way in which universities tend so often to want to categorize.