research:projects:publications

My activity as an artist, a teacher, and a researcher use art in and as educational inquiry.   Common to all of my work is the emphasis on relationships as an intersection in art, education, and the community.  

dissertation research

This arts-based dissertation explored an art teacher and her students’ interactions and movements in, out, and through a high school art class using visual maps. Art as research by way of visual mapping methods emerged as a tool teachers can use to reflect and analyze their unique teaching and classroom contexts.  Using the conceptual idea the art room assemblage is an Australian mud map, the art room becomes an ephemeral relational space formed by the teacher and students with mappable felt and seen forces, the nuanced coordinates of new materialism, affect theory, and immanence.  Visual cartographic content generated around teacher/student conversation and artmaking constructed all aspects of this research project.  Visual cartography mapped content from informal interviews, observation/video, teacher and students’ artwork, and the researcher/artist journal/sketchbook. Further, the project draws on situational analysis, which provides a way to see various relationships in context.   Serving as a mode of analytic thinking, visual mapping takes the focus away from a single subject and placing emphasis on the art room assemblage as a whole.  Encouraging the reader/viewer to consider the varied social situations within an art room assemblage, this research invites looking at the art room in a different way and asking more questions.  The implications from this research direct in-service and pre-service art educator professional development towards art-based practitioner research, herein advocating for the artist-teacher to research their own contexts with the very skills and knowledge that they are teaching.  

free summer art programing

Artcation was a community-based art collective for youth of all ages.  In  summer 2016 The Plant offered a free a summer program.  The Plant is made up of volunteers.  Made up of community members based at FSU, FAMU and in Tallahassee at large, Plant volunteers share a love of the arts and an interest in promoting creativity to support community engagement and social justice.
Artcation is part of the Plant. The Plant is an all-inclusive creative space, where everyone is welcomed and empowered to organize, research, and encourage the free expression of others. The Plant is a not for profit venue and is operated by volunteers. 

Collaborative community engagement and outreach

The Waging Peace! Project is bringing together formal and informal institutions around themes of generating energy and action toward peace through artist talks, multi-disciplinary art-making workshops, k-12 curricular activities, participant exhibitions, and city wide cultural events.  

I am involved with this community project in several ways:

As a researcher I am involved in a study called Waging Peace: The Cultural Politics of a Collaborative, Interdisciplinary Art Initiative. The purpose of the research project aims to gain insight into the cultural politics of this event through describing and interpreting the development and impacts of a project of this kind. 

As a researcher I explored my participation in a project of this kind in a collaborative auto-ethnography with a museum educational curator, an elementary art teacher, and a museum intern.  

As a community space volunteer and artist, I facilitated and collaborated with local artists  in designing workshops that engage the community in visual dialogues around the theme Waging Peace! at Plant Art Collective.   The artwork created in the workshops will be exhibited at The Plant in May 2018 as part of a student tour of Waging Peace! sites around Tallahassee.