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Artists have long demonstrated that research is often central to the act of art-making and that art is a means of knowledge-production. For artists affiliated with academia, research is not only a foundational element but an occupational requisite. The lines of artistic research and scholarly research are often blurred.
This impact is particularly evident in Boston — its academic legacy boasting over 40 universities and colleges located in the metropolitan area alone. Hosted by Artadia and Tufts University Art Galleries at the SMFA at Tufts University, this panel of artists working with and within academia will share their diverse approaches to pushing the boundaries of what it means to engage in artistic research. They will also discuss strategies for effectively articulating and advocating for the wider relevance of artistic research within academic contexts, thereby offering up other possibilities for creative practice to nourish, challenge, and re-imagine academic inquiry.
We are thrilled to hold this panel discussion with Luis Arnías, 2023 Wagner Foundation Boston Artadia Awardee, Artist, and Filmmaker; Lucy Cotter, Artist, Curator, and Writer; and Lucy Kim, 2014 Boston Artadia Awardee, Artist, and Educator. This panel will be moderated by Laurel V. McLaughlin, Curator and Director of the Collective Futures Fund, Tufts University Art Galleries. Generous support for this program has been provided by the Wagner Foundation.
“Artists in Academia: artistic research as practice” will take place on April 16, from 6:00–7:30pm at the SMFA at Tufts University Art Galleries located at 230 The Fenway Boston, MA 02115.
About the speakers:
Luis Arnías is a filmmaker from Venezuela who currently lives and works in Boston, MA. In 2009, he completed the diploma program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and in 2020 he received his Masters in Film/Video from Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College. He has screened at New York Film Festival, TIFF, Punto de Vista, Berlin Critics’ Week (Woche Der Kritik) and BlackStar Film Festival. He was a Fellow at The Film Study Center at Harvard University and recipient of the Herb Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship 2022. Arnías makes experimental 16mm films. He moves through space seeking what moves him. He starts a film by walking and following light. When he sees an object or person or situation in his viewfinder, there is a mutual recognition, they bring each other into being. It is laborious work. Conjuring work. A visual exploration of his enduring experience as an immigrant person of Afro-Caribbean descent living in America.
Lucy Cotter works across a spectrum of practice and theory, often coming full circle through writing, making, curating, and educating. Her book Reclaiming Artistic Research (2024) embraces art’s dynamic engagement with other fields, foregrounding how its multi-sensory nature creates possibilities to transform, queer, decolonize, and de-ableize knowledge. She holds a PhD in cultural analysis, engaging with the agency of curating in a post/colonial world. Her curatorial accolades include being the curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017, and co-curator of Here as the Centre of the World, a transnational project in six global cities. She has curated exhibitions, performance, and events internationally at venues including Kunstinstitut Melly, Rotterdam; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam; e-flux, New York; The Kitchen, New York; the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, and Oregon Center for Contemporary Art, Portland.
Lucy Kim is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture and biological media. In her hybrid works, she embraces distortion as a tool to deconstruct how we see what we see: the relationship between our evolved vision-centricity, constructed socio-cultural systems, and personal desires. Kim is a recipient of a 2024 Howard Foundation Fellowship in the Emerging Arts and a 2022 Creative Capital Award for her project printing images with bacteria that has been genetically-modified to produce melanin. Melanin is the main bio-pigment behind human skin, hair, and eye color. She began this project while an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and continues to develop it at Boston University, where she teaches. Through this project, Kim expands her committed study of our visual habits, which she first began in her sculptural paintings using unconventional processes in the studio. Kim is based in Cambridge, MA and is Associate Professor of Art at Boston University.
Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, is a writer, curator, art historian, and educator working as the Curator and the Director of the Collective Futures Fund at the Tufts University Art Galleries. Her work explores migratory aesthetics, ecological networks, and artistic research in performance, new media, and sculpture. She has shared her scholarly and curatorial work in conferences ranging from Performance Studies International, Universities Art Association of Canada Conference, the College Art Association, and the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present. McLaughlin has also published writing in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, ASAP Journal, Women & Performance, among others, and co-edited the multidisciplinary reader Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production (Amherst College Press, 2024). McLaughlin’s curatorial work has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Dutch Consulate of New York, and a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship for a forthcoming exhibition How do you throw a brick through a window….
About the presenters:
As the home for visual arts at Tufts University, the Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) create dynamic learning space through a responsive program of exhibitions, events, collecting, and scholarship across two locations—in Medford at the Aidekman Arts Center, and in Boston at SMFA at Tufts.
Artadia has awarded over $6 million in unrestricted funds to over 400 artists nationally. Celebrating visual artists and their foundational role in shaping society, the Artadia Award benefits three artists annually in seven major US cities with high concentrations of creative workers—Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Photo of Lucy Cotter by Mario Gallucci. Photo of Luis Arnías by Mel Taing. Photo of Lucy Kim by Jonathan Eden.