This year, six Arts Research + Resilience projects were awarded funding through a continuing partnership between the Arizona Institute for Resilience and the College of Fine Arts.
Each project uses the tools of artistic inquiry to build more connected, creative, and resilient communities—whether through public exhibitions, experimental filmmaking, or trapeze-based theatre. Projects were selected based on their ability to build resilient individuals and communities through practice-based arts research methods.
“I’m grateful to the Institute for Resilience for continuing to support this artist-led research that integrates into a wide range of knowledge domains, connects disciplines, engages with community, and builds a sense of belonging.” said Ellen McMahon, associate dean for research for the College of Fine Arts.
Arts Research Gathering
On April 11, the primary investigators and selected Integrative Arts Research Fellows will give five-minute lightning talks at the Arts Research Gathering at the Slonaker House, 4-6p.
Presenters will share current or recent practice-based arts research projects. The discussion will explore topics such as:
- How arts research differs from scientific research, and why an integrated approach can be valuable
- Project design, including goals, methods, outcomes, impact, and ways to measure success
- Project implementation, with a focus on scaling, collaboration, partnerships, funding, and publishing
Arts Research + Resilience projects
Ground/Water II: Water Advocacy on the Santa Cruz
Co-PIs: Jacqueline Jean Barrios (College of Humanities) and Martina Shenal (School of Art)
A transdisciplinary project focuses on water justice advocacy efforts in the Southside, in close proximity to the Tucson International Airport Superfund site, remediation efforts and impacts from discharging water treated for TCE, 1,4 Dioxane, & PFAS, into the Santa Cruz watershed. The project engages research faculty and students from Public & Applied Humanities and the School of Art, alongside community stakeholders and representatives from Tucson’s water advocacy initiatives. Undergraduate students in courses, PAH: 420: Innovation and the Human Condition – Southside Stories of Environmental Resilience and ART 343A: Traditional Photographic Techniques, are working with Co-PIs, and graduate research assistants, to collaboratively create a set of briefs that make use of the tools of spatial visualization, interpretation, and visual storytelling, to design a publicly-engaged project that intervenes, complements, documents and amplifies the community’s historic struggle to care for their water and environment.
Expanding Design-Based Data Visualization at the Wonder Studio at Biosphere 2
Co-PIs Asst. Prof Nicole Antebi (School of Art) and Sr. Research Technologist Aaron Bugaj (Biosphere 2)
Funds will support the documentary film, Moving Science, which explores the role of animation and data visualization in resilience science and will serve as a call to action for viewers. Co-PIs will expand expertise in visualizing and interpreting complex data, a skill that is foundational to advancing interdisciplinary resilience research at U of A by enrolling in the New School Infographics and Data Visualization certificate program. These activities will better position their ongoing project, Wonder Studio for integration into broader impacts grant proposals NIH, NASA, NSF funding opportunities and for extramural opportunities as well as provide direct benefit to U of A student workforce development through new instructional training in data visualization.
THE ECOLOGY OF TIME: Activating Long-Term Environmental Stewardship on the Santa Rita Experimental Range
Co-PIs: Brett Blum (Southern Arizona Experiment Station) and Jonathon Keats (Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, College of Fine Arts)
Two millennium cameras created by artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats will be Installed on the grounds of the Santa Rita Experimental Range in collaboration with Southern Arizona Experiment Station. Visitors will be invited to contribute a visual representation or textual description of what they expect to see in the Santa Rita in the year 3125. SRER will collect these materials, archiving them together with the repeat photography already underway– the project complements and expands upon the more-than-hundred-year history of repeat photography in the region. The shift in perspective encouraged by the cameras is intended to bolster adaptable desert communities, cultures, and ecosystems and to foster leadership in resilience, goals that are consistent with the mission of AIR’s TRIF/WEES Initiative themes. In 2023, supported by an AIR Resilience Grant, Keats installed a single millennium camera at the midpoint of Tumamoc Hill. A University of Arizona news story about the camera garnered media attention globally, with hundreds of articles and interviews.
The Climate Project: Trapeze Training for Resilience and Performance
PI Rick Wamer (School of Theatre, Film & Television) with consultant Chris Impey (College of Science)
This grant funds a professional aerial theatre artist to train up to 10 student/actors, and for video documentation, in preparation for the continuation of a multi-year physical theatre research project, “The Climate Change Project.” The performance is scheduled for fall 2025, supported by the School of Theatre, Film & Television. This process will empower a resilience in collaborative devising of physical theatre among the participants that exposes climate change issues, seeks solutions, and encourages and inspires audiences to do the same. The training necessary to create the physical endurance and capacity to shift the body’s weight and adjust in motion on trapeze with other ensemble bodies in play develops a resilience capacity within the actors to make immediate performance adjustments. This same capacity for resilience is actively transferable when responding to upcoming human caused climate change challenges. The precarious balance and use of the body in trapeze artistry, and the expression of the art as an embodiment of resilience are strong metaphors for the delicate balance of nature in this time of the Anthropocene.
El Pueblo 50: Celebrating the Living Heart of Tucson’s Southside
Co-PIs: Jacqueline Barrios (College of Humanities), Rebecca Senf (Center for Creative Photography) with Kenny Wong (College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture), Liz Soltero (Sunnyside Foundation), Selina Barajas (Community Advocate).
El Pueblo 50 is a community co-curated public exhibition documenting and presenting the stories of Southside Tucson resilience. It is an extension of the integrative arts research project, Documenting Resilience in Tucson’s Southside, sustaining the impact of ongoing arts research with and at El Pueblo, a historic hub of Southside reinvestment and advocacy.
Artistic Expression of Original Research
Co-organized by Jessica Maccaro (University of California-Riverside PhD student) and Ellen McMahon (College of Fine Arts).
STEM graduate students learn art approaches and methods from art graduate student students in order to translate their research into visually engaging and accessible forms, bridging academic and public audiences. The Artistic Expression of Original Research program began with a three-day retreat featuring artists-led workshops across mediums from poetry, animation, screen-printing, illustration, music, puppetry, and sculpture. The retreat served as a space to co-incubate ideas between disciplines and brainstorm the STEM graduate students’ final artworks. Through the process of creating art, researchers gain fresh perspectives and understandings of their work and a new way to communicate its significance. The exhibitions invite audiences to engage with the research in an accessible and emotional way, helping to bridge the gap between scientific and non-scientific communities.
Projects made possible by the Technology and Research Initiative Fund/Water, Environmental, and Energy Solutions Initiative administered by the University of Arizona Office for Research, Innovation and Impact and the Arizona Institute for Resilience.
Related workshops with Jonathon Keats
Jonathon Keats, artist, writer, experimental philosopher and Art & Science Designated Campus Colleague, College of Fine Arts, leads several upcoming workshops.
“Conventional research methods are designed to study experimentally or theoretically enclosed environments from the outside. Arts research is an environment, an entanglement of actions, actors, and apparatus.” — Jonathon Keats
Love Poems for Fireflies
Lit Speaker Series with the Department of English
April 11, 10a-noon, Little Chapel of All Nations
A hands-on workshop with Jonathon Keats exploring the power of poetry as a communicative medium shared across species, as well as an instrument for thinking about human impact and responsibility in a more-than-human-world.
Building Tomorrow: Adapting Tucson Housing for the Climate Of 2075 … and Beyond
April 11, 2-5p, ENR2
Keats in collaboration with the Institute for Energy Solutions, this hands-on workshop explores future climates in terms of geographically based climate analogs, helping you to reimagine home by learning from housing in places that currently have the climate you’re likely to encounter in the future. Over the course of three hours, you’ll discover how different architectural traditions contend with extreme weather. RSVP
Prequel to the Martian Chronicles
April 13, 2-3p, Biosphere 2
In this hands-on workshop led Biosphere 2 artist-in-residence Jonathon Keats, participants will be invited to translate the 1924 transmission into a form legible to humans. Participants will invent their own systems for deciphering the radio signal and set the stories they discover in handmade books that will subsequently be collected in the Biosphere 2 library. Part of “The Martian Chronicles at 75: A Reading Event at Biosphere 2.”