Map of FSMLs and Artist-Residencies

Finding an artist-residency program to work with on ArtSciConverge at your field station or marine lab (FSML) can really help. They can refer good artists to you, and act as partners in art/sci projects, grant applications and other programs. Some of these residencies are even looking for scientists to enrich their residencies, and you can help them find some.

Many artist residencies are already focused on ecology. I've worked with the Organization of Biological Field Stations (OBFS) and the Alliance of Artist Communities (AAC) to produce a map to help you find each other. I'd like to keep developing the map with more residencies, since many FSMLs also produce research in the social sciences and humanities, as well as the hard sciences.

Let us know if you use the map to make a connection.


View Potential Partners in ArtSciConverge in a full screen map

Alliance of Artist Communities - 2018 Emerging Program Institute, October 13-15, 2018

Field stations and marine labs with a current or proposed artist residency should seriously consider attending this AAC training, which

"...combines best practices from the arts-and-cultural sector with specific, hands-on information about artist residencies."

Held October 13-15, 2018 in Philadelphia, PA, "this training combines best practices from the arts-and-cultural sector with specific, hands-on information about artists' residencies.

Whether you are still in the early dreaming stage of creating an artist colony or working with an established institution that is developing a new residency program, the Emerging Program Institute will offer models for success, a community of peers, and access to residency leaders, funders, and connectors. #aac18epi

Topics include:

• community engagement and the relevance of place 
• building a support base and funding your program 
• equity and access in artist outreach, engagement and selection 
• business planning for artist residencies 
• "ask an expert" panels of residency leaders, artists and government funders 
• case studies, site visits - and more!

PLEASE NOTE: We cap attendance at 50 people to keep the program participatory and accessible. This Institute sells out every year, so we encourage you to register early to secure your spot! Registration opens in June."

Additionally, the training is held just before the 2018 Alliance of Artist Communities annual conference in Philadelphia, so you can plan to attend that event as well, to make connections that will benefit your program.

Such an inspiring panel this morning at the Alliance of Arts Communities conference in Denver this morning. #aac17conf #digitalsketchnotes #digital #sketchnotes #politics #values

A post shared by Heather Leavitt Martinez (@corpgraffitiart) on Oct 4, 2017 at 9:52am PDT

I replaced my Apple Pencil and am back in business! Sketchnoting Evolution of a Board from "The Art of Governance" with Carolyn Love #aac17conf . . #sketchnotes #digital #sketchnoting #applepencil #nonprofit #arts #boarddevelopment #ipadpro #lettering #adobedraw #evolution

A post shared by Heather Leavitt Martinez (@corpgraffitiart) on Oct 3, 2017 at 2:03pm PDT

Learning so much about funding for artists at the Alliance of Arts Communities conference in Denver this morning. #aac17conf #digitalsketchnotes #digital #sketchnotes #politics #values #adobedraw #applepencil #ipadpro #yellow #red #blue #white #digitalink

A post shared by Heather Leavitt Martinez (@corpgraffitiart) on Oct 4, 2017 at 10:37am PDT

While I didn’t finish the first skectchnote (there was so much to learn and it went so fast), here you can see how two of my digital sketchnotes came to be last week at the Alliance of Artist Communities conference in Denver. #aac17conf #digitalsketchnotes #sketchnotes #ipadpro #adobedraw #applepencil #instavideo #videogram #digitaldrawing #timelapse

A post shared by Heather Leavitt Martinez (@corpgraffitiart) on Oct 11, 2017 at 8:28pm PDT

First Poet in Residence at CCI

"The Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) is a unique collaboration between the University of Cambridge and leading internationally-focused biodiversity conservation organisations clustered in and around Cambridge, UK.  

CCI seeks to transform the global understanding and conservation of biodiversity and the natural capital it represents and, through this, secure a sustainable future for all life on Earth. The CCI partners together combine and integrate research, education, policy and practice to create innovative solutions for society and to foster conservation learning and leadership."

Matt Howard from RSPB on sabbatical at CCI as our first Poet in Residence.

Matt works in Fundraising for the RSPB Eastern England team. He will be spending his month of sabbatical time at CCI as our first poet in residence, starting on Monday 14 August.

Part of Matt’s role with RSPB is to explore engagement with the arts and he is the lead on the RSPB / The Rialto Nature and Place poetry competition which now additionally partners with CCI and BirdLife.

Matt’s poetry has been published in leading international magazines and journals such as The Poetry Review, New Statesman and The Dark Horse. His debut pamphlet, The Organ Box, was published in 2014.

Throughout his sabbatical, Matt will be based in the Artist in Residence studio (floor 2M of the East Tower). He will break his time up into one week a month, and he will also be at CCI some Fridays over the next few months.

In addition to providing Matt with time to write and network at CCI, the residency has a number of ambitions, all with the aim to gain a deeper understanding of how creative writing can help provide public engagement opportunities and deliver conservation objectives. Matt will be working to:

• Host poetry events at CCI with leading poets
• Develop the Nature and Place competition to increase its fundraising potential
• Work with Modern Poetry in Translation magazine on an issue of international environmental poetry
• Facilitate opportunities for other early career poets to engage with CCI to produce new work for publication and performance.

Matt will also offer colleagues from CCI member organisations opportunities to engage with the residency. Opportunities include:

• One to ones with people interested in developing their own writing and reading
• Establish a workshop group for those interested in writing new poems
• Joining a mailing list to receive a fortnightly poem from the existing canon on a nature / conservation theme, with an explanatory note by him.

Matt is contactable on matt.howard@rspb.org.uk, please do get in touch if you are interested in getting involved. Information on the intranet can be found here.

Field Notes of a Terranaut

Artist Alan MacDonald was inspired by the notebooks of DaVinci and Michelangelo to create his recent work, Field Notes of a Terranaut. MacDonald has some lucid ideas about the creative process:

"Our senses filter out vast amounts of information unessential for survival of the body-organism. Yet still, a trickle of information enters the mind experienced as intuition, a creative spark. Aha moments. Truly creative artists are in a sense mystics, 'receiving' non local information in order to co-create local objects that inspire and extend consciousness."

I would argue that this statement applies to truly creative scientists, as well: they notice things that the rest of us filter out. Perhaps we lack a term for the truly creative perception that distinguishes transformative art and science from the merely pedestrian?

Social Sculpture and Climate Change

Like politics, science supports a position. They both have an opinion, though arising out of very different sources.

Politics is a reflection and harnessing of public opinion: the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by a population for whatever reason. Scientific opinion, on the other hand, "harnesses the opinions of many different scientific organizations and entities and individual scientists in the relevant field, and is ultimately based on observation": that is, what is empirically demonstrable. The thing to note here, is that--unlike political consensus--once scientific consensus is reached and knowledge has been created from data, that doesn't mean there has actually been any connection made to public opinion, nor to the mechanisms of social change. Art can fill this disconnect, and has frequently been used by politicians as a tool to effect change in the working of the world.

As an example,  Soviet communist party leaders "depicted the United States as a cultural black hole and cited their own significant culture as evidence that they were the inheritors of the European Enlightenment". The Congress for Cultural Freedoms was organized, operated and funded by the CIA to promote American Abstract Expressionism to Europeans in the 1950's as a superior counterpoint to Soviet agitprop art. This covert operation was enthusiastically supported by New York's MOMA and the Ford Foundation. The CIA, acting secretly due to public and Congressional hostility to modern art, funded numerous traveling European exhibitions, symphonies, and many magazines that provided a platform for favorable art criticism. The aftermath of WWII was a not just a military Cold War, but also a cultural one, fought for the hearts and minds of the European intelligentsia. The fascinating and unsettling full story of the CIA and modern art is told in at least two books and a documentary, Hidden Hands (watch Episode 2 here), by Frances Stonor Saunders. Read Chapter 1 of The Cultural Cold War here.

In fact, the CIA still maintains a collection of important modern art used for agent training.

"We’ll have some of our guys and gals come down here and do a critical analysis of the paintings. Say you’ve got to analyze this big, heavy duty ISIL problem over here — maybe if you come look at the painting, it’ll help you think about how to solve the ISIL problem creatively."

* * *

With climate change emerging as the primary global social problem of the Anthropocene geological era, and a massive obsession of the scientific world, it is startling and alarming that politics is not bending art to address this unprecedented challenge. As Bill McKibbon said, "...though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?" Science can't offer this.

In the absence of political support (and funding), artists often seek to make cultural change on their own.

"There are experts in little things, but there are no experts in big things. All of us, no matter what we do, have the right to make moral decisions about the world....Everyone must be involved. -- Rachel Schragis 

The historian says [of war], "It's not my business." The lawyer says, "It's not my business." The businessman says, "It's not my business." And the artist says, "It's not my business." Then whose business is it? Does that mean you are going to leave the business of the most important issues in the world to the people who run the country? How stupid can we be? Haven't we had enough experience historically with leaving the important decisions to the people in the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, and those who dominate the economy?...It is the job of the artist to...think outside the boundaries of permissible thought and dare to say things that no one else will say. " -- Howard Zinn

“Art was supposed to change things … after studying art history, you realize that’s not always the case, but I love that spirit about what art is supposed to be. Art is part of our larger world so it’s not just by itself trying to do that … yeah, so art does change things.” -- Kellie Jones, Curator and Art Historian

Operating, as we do, on the front-lines of climate change, field stations and marine labs do well to engage with and support artists who are interested in the same things we are.

Mary Beth Leigh | TEDxFairbanks

Seeing the Elephant: Reintegrating Arts, Humanities & Sciences

"Collaborations between the arts, humanities and sciences can strengthen our connection to the ecosystems in which we live. This TEDx talk highlights work done by Mary Beth Leigh combining ecology, dance, visual art, and other media to advance the arts, sciences, and public understanding of social-ecological issues. 

Mary Beth Leigh is an Associate Professor of Microbiology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and is an organizer of state and national efforts to integrate the arts and humanities with ecological science. She directs the Alaska-based program, In a Time of Change, and co-organizes the nationwide networks, Ecological Reflections and ArtSciConverge. 

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx"

"Art in a Changing Climate"

Here's a great blog post by Christina Catanese at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, in Pennsylvania:

Bill McKibben wrote, in a 2005 essay on climate change and art, “But oddly, though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?”

Climate change is abstract, cognitively complex, with no clear single villain; dialogue around climate change often induces self-defensiveness, the steps needed to respond require long time horizons, and many of the victims are distant, in either space or time. More so than many other environmental issues, climate change is a social as well as scientific challenge, making it even harder to wrap our minds around. For decades, climate scientists have tried to make their work resonate, but too often, the result is either data overload, or fear and warning of dire and disastrous consequences, which people tune out. Mounting evidence shows that our brains are simply not wired for this kind of abstraction – we respond subconsciously based on emotion, not data.

Luckily, artists are good at appealing to these parts of ourselves, with the ability to activate our imaginations, catalyze mindshifts, motivate change and action, and develop outside-the-box solutions...

Read the entire post here.