Breakout Sessions Related to Practice

Including Panels, Working Groups, and Papers, Performances, and Presentations

​

Art + California: Proximity, Place, and the Public Research University

University of California's 10 campuses are uniquely situated within the diverse geographies of the state (urban, suburban, rural, bordered, inland and coastal). As anchor institutions, they host unique field ecologies for study and research, situated over time and place. Among the largest employers in the state, these campuses play a key role in shaping socio-economic and land-use development in their regions. A visual survey across California's public universities and their surrounding environs will profile a range of campus-based projects and strategies within the national organizing framework of Imagining America (IA), recently relocated to the UC system at Davis. IA is a network of more than 140 affiliated colleges and universities, advocating for publicly-engaged scholarship in the arts, humanities and design. Place-based initiatives focusing on civic inclusion, academic/community agency and sustainability will be analyzed at varying scales and field settings. These case studies will frame a broader conversation among session participants.

​

"Listening to the City": Creative Methods of Inquiry and Engagement

How can creative approaches to community research and advocacy lead to more participatory decision-making? How can sound-based interventions help us to more fully understand and empathize with the complexities of our urban environments? What can we learn through critical listening that our other senses can’t teach us? Through an introduction to the Listening to the City Project, this session invites academics, artists, and activists to explore a variety of new engagement tools that can be applied in their own change making work with communities.

​

Improvisation as Civic Engagement

Through a variety of "on your feet" exercises and games, participants will explore how improv can enhance the ways they communicate with others. We will discover and develop practical skills to sharpen our ability to pay attention, to shift focus swiftly, and to work effectively in teams. All are welcome.

​

Connecting Campus to Community Through Creative Collaborations

This case study presentation, aimed at educators, administrators, and civic-minded students, will focus on our learnings from three annual EUREKA! events. EUREKA! brings Rochester Institute of Technology students together with Rochester-area organizations to use their design capabilities to address pressing issues. The organizers will discuss strategies, best practices, and challenges in executing these types of community design charrettes.

​

URBAN PROTOTYPING_The Physical-Digital Interface

Urban prototyping – as coined by the Grey Area Foundation in San Francisco in 2012 - is a new global movement exploring the potential of small-scale urban art and design projects located in the public realm. As a creative place making strategy urban prototyping is soliciting, testing, and deploying digital and physical projects with a high impact on urban transformation, civic participation, and urban sensing enhancing urban livability and smart communities. Focusing on cross-disciplinary design research involving digital technology, art, and urban design, this paper will introduce five urban prototypes and their creative place making settings to discuss emerging physical digital interfaces and their potential to shape urban neighborhoods and public spaces. With the Web 3.0 and the Internet of Things at the horizon, the discussion of these projects will critically focus on the potential impact of user generated data as a support for smart communities and will further include the relevance of interdisciplinary cooperation, funding models, and design build projects as a critical educational model. Among other examples the paper will discuss “The 10 Mile Garden” [commissioned by the Urban Prototyping Event San Francisco 2012, designers: El Khafif, Del Signore, Iwan, Lopez], “On The Line”, a project that examines ways in which physical infrastructure can be paired with citizen-driven action to simultaneously shape and communicate the identity of a region [funded by the Waterloo Region, 2014, designers: El Khafif, Przybylski], the temporary public stage “iLounge instant interim interactive” [commissioned by Zero 1 Biennial in San Jose, 2012, designers: El Khafif, Del Signore], “Urban Syncopation”, a public art project that is sensing urban sounds [presented at Nuit Blanche in Toronto, 2016, designers: El Khafif, Berman, Beites, Del Signore], as well as a current research project entitled “Community Centered Urban Sensing” [commissioned by the School of Architecture El Khafif, Zhang, Mondschein] conducted at the University of Virginia that engages with data collection, community engagement, and urban sensing. The important takeaway from this presentation will be an understanding of current urban prototyping strategies including their capacity to trigger civic participation, data literacy, and entrepreneurship as well as a discussion of urban prototype typologies that are located at the physical digital interface.

​

More Drama Less Trauma: Theatre and Communities on the Brink

This interactive, performance-based workshop illustrates techniques for urban planners and community activists to access emotional and interpersonal dynamics that stand in the way of addressing community challenges. Using dramatic constructs and ways of seeing communities through the lens of a dramatic arc, this workshop explores cultural difference and human connection as essential tools to break down silos and envision new solutions in community and organizational settings.

​

Creating a Public Space/Activity for Civic Engagement and Development

This session will examine the methods and activities of UX - a free school of continuing development being built by its primarily working class students of color and volunteer teachers - in New York City. UX is the creation, by those making use of it, of a new civic realm, a realm in which curiosity and love of learning is being re-ignited among a sector of our population often written off and/or feared. This talk, by UX associate dean and co-founder Dan Friedman, is for all interested in exploring a unique and successful experiment in bringing intellectual and social development beyond academia into poor working class communities.

​

Embedding Artists: Residencies, Creative Placemaking, and Social Justice

This session features three models for creative placekeeping and artist residencies from within a variety of different types of institutions: municipal government, higher education, and a Main Street local merchant organization.

​

A Music and Health University-Community Partnership

This session is relevant to a broad audience with interests in music and health. Presenters will describe a partnership between the School of Music at Arizona State University and Mayo Clinic Humanities in Medicine program, and share results from a small research project examining the social benefits of participation.

​

Innovating Tradition: Cultivating the Civic-Minded 21st Century Musician

This panel discussion aims to present an overview of three departments within New England Conservatory, sharing relevant curricular pedagogy and creative experiential opportunities. We aim to show/share how the ideals of a civic-minded education are integral to artistic output, engaging attendees in reflection and continued exploration of this type of model.

​

Building a More Mutual Architecture for Cross-Disciplinary, Community-Embedded Inquiry

Universities are at great promise for fostering and promoting cross-disciplinary work. Yet often their infrastructure and human resource systems get in the way of realizing this possibility. Using the example of a multi-disciplinary lullaby project designed to promote maternal well-being, the panelists will engage the audience in imagining small and large changes that could facilitate innovation, exchange, and education that featured learning to work across boundaries. 

​

Experience Design and Public Realm: Investigating and Fostering Situations of Agency, Participation, and Engagement

This panel brings together scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines whose work focuses on the intersection of human experience and public realm to investigate perspectives, frameworks and models that can facilitate the design for situations of agency, participation, and public engagement. We propose to explore the collective aspects of experience design in the public realm which shifts the cultural focus of experience from individual to collective, from user to citizen. Panelists will investigate this territory through case studies and interactive discussion.

​

The Art of Tweeting: The Smartphone as a Tool for Artistic Engagement, Civic Discourse, and Intellectual Activation

Social media platforms and smartphone technologies can be repurposed to increase audience engagement in artistic space. The use of social media can provide opportunities for students to critically analyze complex texts and collaborate with peers. Participants will consider Twitter and other social media platforms as tools for intellectual and artistic engagement and identify the attributes of social media that can be applied to arts based research; explore the use of social media for fostering access to complex concepts and equitable participation; and construct a plan for using smart phone technologies in participant's unique research or creative.

​

Creating a Center for Art and Social Engagement at an Urban Research University

What does it mean to put social engagement in the center of the arts at an urban research university? To explore this question, we discuss the creation of the Center for Art and Social Engagement at the University of Houston. Attendees will learn about the institutional hurdles that are inevitable when a large research institution decides to embed something as "hi-touch" and contingent as social engagement in the mission and curriculum.

​

Identifying and Building Communities Through Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Case Studies at the Spencer  Museum of Art and The Commons at the University of Kansas

Through their respective collaborations, the Spencer Museum of Art and The Commons have galvanized a number of cross-disciplinary projects, which are designed to explore new questions through multiple modes. Each is led by a different group of faculty and researchers and relies on different forms of artist expression to engage new and broader communities through common cause, vocation, and proximity. This session will be relevant to those interested in cross-disciplinary collaboration, drawing connections between the university and extended communities, and those curious to see how interdisciplinary work can lead to larger and unimagined outcomes.

​

The Infra-Space Initiative: Support for Art in Infrastructural Spaces

This session will discuss the Infra-Space initiative, a public-private partnership program to enhance the urban public realm experience of highway viaducts through new multi-modal connections, natural storm water improvements, and supporting infrastructure for art. This presentation will describe the specific partnerships between local private actors, community groups, designers, and arts organizations with the state transportation agency, and specific design measures developed to re-envision the spaces of the highway infrastructure as a unique zone for artistic expression as a means to connect the city across an infrastructural border zone. Audiences may include public sector officials, arts and civic organization leaders, designers, and researchers interested in intersection of art and infrastructure.

​

Public Art and Place Making: An Ongoing Collaboration Between Fine Art and Urban Planning at University of Cincinnati

Kate Bonansinga, Director, School of Art, and Danilo Palazzo, Director, School of Planning, will co-present about how they connect their university curricula to community needs and priorities through faculty research and teaching about public art and placemaking. Artists, community planners, and academics who want to bridge the gap between universities and their proximate neighborhoods through placemaking pedagogy may find this presentation to be of interest.

​

Creative Placemaking in Historic Appalachian Ohio: The Arts at the Ridges (Athens, Ohio)

The Ridges, an historic area on the Ohio University campus in Athens, Ohio, was originally known as the Athens Lunatic Asylum. The hospital was built in the late 1860's according to the "moral treatment" philosophy of Dr. Thomas Kirkbride. The presenters will explore the successes and challenges inherent in anchoring the fine arts at The Ridges in support of creative placemaking in Athens County. The intended audience includes faculty leaders, campus administrators, and community builders. Learning outcomes include consideration of advocacy for the arts in the midst of competing priorities, and the importance of community-based mission.

​

Arts Entrepreneurship as Civic Engagement: Teaching Sassafras in Tuscaloosa

This presentation uses an interdisciplinary, team-taught course as a case study to examine a novel model of arts entrepreneurship as it applies to community engagement. The class, "Social Justice and the Arts: Teaching Sassafras", critically investigates models of collaborative, interdisciplinary Social Practice by asking students to examine visual art as a catalyst for community development, innovate strategies for addressing the needs and goals of a specific local organization (in this case, the Sassafras Center for Arts and Environment in Tuscaloosa, AL), and implement practical tools for supporting those strategies. Arts entrepreneurship, in this context, is an inherently exploratory practice that addresses social and aesthetic objectives, as well as goals for sustainability. Intended audience: Instructors and administrators in studio art, art history, community engagement, cultural studies, etc.; Learning outcome: Understanding arts entrepreneurship beyond business models.

​

Artist Residencies - Inclusion, Community, and Service Through the Arts at Boston University

Boston University campus partners from three different five-day residencies (global music, noh theatre, and integrated dance) will share the process of setting priorities, executing programming, engaging partners on and off campus, and marketing the residency. Each residency included classroom visits with faculty, panel discussions, demonstrations, master classes, and culminated in public performance. Sharing specific elements of an effective model for utilizing artist residencies to advance dialogue and action on inclusion and community engagement. For faculty (arts and non-arts) and campus arts programming units.

​

Community Cultural Development On-Line: Bridging Across Distance and Difference, the Arts and Community Development

The VTArtWorks Initiative at Virginia Tech is partnered with CoLab Cooperative to design and construct an on-line, crowd-sourced communications hub for grass-roots arts-making partnerships building democratically healthy, fully inclusive communities. Project leaders will demonstrate how the portal is addressing social, cultural, intellectual, and geographical challenges in the field of practice.

​

REFUGEE STORIES: Applying Visual Narrative to Advocate for Refugee Acceptance in Local and Global Communities

This case study presents the results of 'REFUGEE STORIES' -- a project with four distinct assignments that require graphic design students to use visual communication to advocate for the disparate groups that make up the world's displaced people. These four diverse approaches include: Childrens' Book Design, Information Design, 'Refugee Nation' Identity Design, and World's Fair Pavilion Design. Attendees will learn ways to encourage students to impact attitudes within their local community and ways to overlap community engagement and advocacy with the existing design curriculum.

​

Art Crossing Borders: Engaging with Mexican-American Relations

This session will discuss the process and lessons obtained during the development of "Crossing Borders", a project exploring how art that is bounded by time and space can engage with a global community. It will address the benefits and risks of artists allowing other voices to occupy the center of their work, and the potential for art to serve as an avenue for global communication. Join if you are interested in Mexican-American relations, political art, and opportunities for providing political dialogue on campus.

​

The Indigenous Arts of Australia and the Americas: Object-based Research for a New Generation

The Mellon Indigenous Arts Fellows Program is part of a broad multi-year initiative focused on The Indigenous Arts of Australia and the Americas: Object-based Research and Curatorial Skill for a New Generation (2016-2020) funded in partnership by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and the Provost’s Office. The Indigenous Arts initiative seeks to establish UVA as a research center of excellence for the study of the Indigenous arts. This goal is in alignment with core initiatives at UVA, including a research focus on the Global South. Among the elements made possible by this new initiative are two curatorial positions in Indigenous arts; a visiting residency program for scholars, artists, and curators who are leaders in the field of Indigenous arts; and new programs and internships on curatorial work for students from a broad range of backgrounds and disciplines. In the context of these core activities, UVA faculty are asking critical questions about the role of the arts today in a public research institution and the ways they engage with different publics of students and residents. We would like to present the answers we have given to these questions in the work of our grant, and lead a discussion with the audience on these questions and ways our answers might be applied in different contexts or ways other institutions might offer alternative answers to these questions.

​