Art in academia

The relationship between art and research can take different shapes and meanings. Recent decades have seen an increase in artists engaging in traditional academic research settings, such as laboratories, collaborating with scientists, philosophers, engineers, and the like. The different interactions between art and academia seem to offer new perspectives to known and complex issues across different fields, allowing artists and researchers to blur the lines between artistic practice and academic research. Although collaboration between artists and researchers has become the main format in these transdisciplinary practices, this interaction can also take place within individuals in the form of artist-researchers and researcher-artists.

Art IN Academia explores a range of possible ways in which academic endeavors, other than art history and art theory, can inform, inspire or become complemented by the art created by scholars and researchers within institutional academic walls. In some cases, these explorations take the form of artistic research, which recently has become recognized as a more legitimate tool for knowledge generation, but they can also become a meta-reflection on one’s own academic field, a part of or inspiration for academic research, or even an attempt to apply academia outside the box.