“Creating Knowledge in Common” Ask Them Anything: Community-Art Making
Jan 31, 2025 1-2pm Eastern/10-11am Pacific
Join a2ru for our second Creating Knowledge in Common “Ask Them Anything” webinar. Creating Knowledge in Common is a special collection on Ground Works, a2ru’s online platform for arts-integrated research. Through peer-reviewed projects, it explores partnered university/community research that centers the arts or design.
Bring all your questions for Creating Knowledge in Common Editors Shannon Criss, Kevin Hamilton, and Mary Pat McGuire, and for project authors Amanda D. Concha-Holmes, Ann Holt, Amy Hillis, and Cindy Maguire. This webinar will have only brief presentations, allowing maximum time for your questions and comments about the collection as a whole and about these authors’ projects: Concha-Holmes’s “Decolonizing the Curriculum: Evoking the Complexity of Black Lives in Florida,” Hillis’s “Mapping the Relationship Between a University and Community Music School,” and Holt and Maguire’s “Side by Side: Navigating the Messy Work of Staying Relational in University-Community Partnerships.”
Read ahead of time, then ask them anything—about community art-making, creating knowledge in common across institutions and communities, mobilizing critical art-making for teaching and learning, building relationships between community arts organizations and research universities, creating artful coalitions in conflict-affected environments, collaborating across boundaries, using art as a medium for change—whatever sparks your interest in these readings! You are warmly invited to bring your questions and your lunch/coffee/snack (depending on your time zone).
Registration
In keeping with the open-access mission of Ground Works, all online events associated with “Creating Knowledge in Common” are free and open to the public. Please use the form linked below to register.
Panelists
Amanda D. Concha-Holmes
Dr. Amanda Concha-Holmes is an applied visual and ecological anthropologist, director of I.R.I.E. Center (Innovative Research and Intercultural Education), and Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Arts, Migration and Entrepreneurship (CAME) at the University of Florida. Her research for the past decade focuses on decolonizing representations of African descendants in the Americas predominantly through embodied forms of knowledge production, collective learning, and digital, art-based academic and healing endeavors. Employing poetic interventions through digital media to document underrepresented people and places is integral to her research, publications, teaching, and local programming. She calls this theoretical and methodological intervention Evocative Ethnography, which is an academic-artistic-healing endeavor that she has pioneered aimed at bringing feminist, decolonial ways of knowing the world to the fore. It extends from insights and theoretical interventions produced by feminists of color to the politics and poetics of representing place, multispecies entanglements, and marginalized bodies and knowledges. Her work has been published in flagship journals like Cultural Anthropology and Visual Anthropology Review, she has received prestigious grants like the Wenner Gren Postdoctorate Research Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Humanities-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication. She has created exhibitions on Evoking the Complexity of Black Lives in Florida at the Harn Museum of Art, the Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center, and the Matheson History Museum. Her most recent work is applying this intervention to decolonizing representations in the public-school curricula through SAAADHI (Sankofa African American Arts and Digital Humanities Initiative) and with a Collaboratory for Digital and Public Humanities comprised of scholars, artists, and community leaders.
Amy Hillis
Dr. Amy Hillis pursues opportunities to build community relationships using music inside and outside the traditional concert hall. She is Assistant Professor of Music at York University in Toronto, Canada and a professional violinist. For three years, she was also the Helen Carswell Chair of Community-Engaged Research in the Arts at York University. Her areas of research are community music including engagement, outreach and education as well as music performance with a specialization in contemporary classical works by Canadian composers. Dr. Hillis regularly collaborates with composers to explore new approaches to western classical and contemporary music. As a soloist, she has commissioned new Canadian works by Matt Brubeck, Fjola Evans, Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière, Laurence Jobidon, Vincent Ho, Andrew Staniland, Jocelyn Morlock, Nicole Lizée, Carmen Braden, Randolph Peters and Jordan Pal. She is winner of the Pan-Canadian Recital Tour, the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition, and an artistic residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Ann Holt
Ann Holt, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of art education at Penn State. She is an advisor and artist teacher with Arts Action Group, an international community-based collective committed to facilitating arts initiatives with children and youth in conflict-affected environments. She serves as research coordinator of the National Art Education Association (NAEA) Women’s Caucus and an NAEA liaison to NYSATA’s ED&I task force. Her research, teaching, and writing encompass social justice issues involving marginalized art education histories, arts, and culture in global development, social transformation, and healing as well as research on and with archives to broaden understanding about engaging art education archival records.
Cindy Maguire
Cindy Maguire is Co-Director of ArtsAction Group and Professor of Communications at Adelphi University. Before joining Adelphi, Cindy was a researcher at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Brown University, as well as faculty at Pratt Institute and New York University’s Art Education Programs. Maguire also taught arts education in the Los Angeles City schools. Research interests include play, STEAM, and the role of collaborative and socially engaged art in personal and social transformation. She is also a practising artist. Her work includes collage, printmaking and digital media as well as creating socially engaged art with children and youth. Maguire received her PhD in Art Education from New York University.
Shannon Criss
Shannon Criss is a professor of architecture at the University of Kansas (KU) and licensed architect. She co-directs the award-winning Dotte Agency, a multi-disciplinary design collaborative that enables community engagement processes to create an architecture that serves marginalized communities. Working with community partners, faculty and students she develops and delivers design solutions that shape the built environment in order to improve public health. Her writings have appeared in Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture, Design Build Education in North America, Plan Journal, and All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture. She has received the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture National Collaborative Practice Award, an International Association for Research on Service-learning and Community Engagement National Public Scholarship Award, and the Steeples Service to Kansans Award. She has served as a Faculty Fellow at KU’s Center for Civic and Social Responsibility and currently serves as a board advisor for Ground Works.
Kevin Hamilton
Kevin Hamilton is an artist, researcher, and administrator, and currently serves as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation in Humanities, Arts, and Related Fields at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A member of the Illinois faculty since 2002, his previous appointments include a term as Dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts (2018-2024), and a role as advisor to Illinois’ Humanities Research Institute on Digital Humanities strategy. Trained as a painter, Hamilton turned in his early career to networked and digital media forms as applied in public art settings, merging historical scholarship and practice through gallery exhibition and commissioned projects. While at Illinois, he has been especially active as a collaborator with scientists and scholars, including research on bias in digital search platforms that led to a significant Supreme Court ruling (Van Buren vs. United States, 2021), and the publishing of Lookout America!: the Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War (Dartmouth, 2019), a definitive history of nuclear test photography in the United States. His work has earned support and recognition from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Illinois Arts Council. Hamilton also contributed to a leading white paper on recognizing community-engaged research in faculty promotion processes, and is a co-founder of Ground Works.
Mary Pat McGuire
Mary Pat McGuire is a Licensed Landscape Architect and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign where she currently serves as Dean’s Fellow for Research in the College of Fine & Applied Arts. With an interest in urban land as a medium for liberating sites and communities for climate resilience and human well-being, in 2022, McGuire formed Depave Chicago, an initiative to enable communities to remove pavement and transform land into healing and life-supportive landscapes. She and her partners are actively working on their first pilot project in South Side Chicago to break ground in summer 2025. McGuire’s work and collaborations appear in The Plan Journal, Landscape Journal, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, Next City, The Nation, Streetsblog USA, and FRESH WATER: Design Research for Inland Water Territories (AR+D, 2019). McGuire earned her Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia.