Books like Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching

Pat Allen demonstrates how art interpretation involves reflection on her creations in an ongoing process of responding creatively to their expression, as contrasted with explanation, analysis, and uncovering hidden ‘meaning.’ As authors say, writing helps them understand what they think, and thought keeps moving like a stream.  

I am often asked whether art-based research can present the art alone without commentary. Documentary films do this in their combination of film footage and narration, but with painting, dance, music, and other art forms, expository reflection suggests how the personal expression furthers understanding and usefulness to others.

Pat Allen models this process by integrating her written responses to visual images into a convincing work of art that I see as presenting artistic inquiry as a new art genre.

Karen Gallas introduced me in the early 1970s to the integration of various forms of artistic expression in the education of young children, based on the work of Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Elwyn Richardson in New Zealand and the British Infant School movement, which inspired experimental education in the United States. 

Languages of Learning grew from Gallas’s classroom research exploring how artistic thinking enabled children with various language, cultural, and learning differences to participate fully in the learning process that she presented as “arts as epistemology” in a symposium with Maxine Greene and others published in the Harvard Educational Review. These foundations in childhood continuously inform artistic inquiry in all of life.

Jung’s Red Book (Liber Novus) is a masterpiece of art-based research.

Although he called his creations ‘nature,’ not ‘art,’ I describe art as a force of nature. In addition to saving his soul during a period of personal crisis, the ‘self-experiment’ perfected the methods, establishing him as a world-renowned figure and arguably the most sustained influence on psychotherapeutic practice to date. His firsthand experimentation exemplifies how personal artistic inquiry can transcend itself to be of use to others.

Where Jung’s heirs kept the manuscript in a vault for almost fifty years after his death, possibly concerned that the intimate expressions might jeopardize his “scientific“ image, the resoundingly positive response to it will set an important precedent for future art-based research. 

Ruth-Mateus-Berr at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and her team of colleagues demonstrate the interface between art-based research and social transformation.

With the support of the Austrian Science Fund, they are conducting an ongoing project furthering social empathy for people living with dementia and improving their lives through art created in community. The research offers what Mateus-Berr calls artistic “portrayals” and “interpretations” of the dementia experience, in various art forms including digital media, with the goal of learning about the condition and changing perceptions of it.

The project catalogue documenting the ongoing research, which has been continuously presented in various art venues including the Venice Biennale, can be viewed at the DEMEDARTS website.

Originally published in 1958 as a textbook, when Aesthetics was updated, it was recognized as the “summa” of the aesthetic theory of art. This is the view that something is art just in case it is made with the intention to afford a certain magnitude of aesthetic experience. Because of his emphasis on aesthetic experience, Beardsley defended the notion of the autonomy of art – the idea that art is essentially independent of all other social practices. Using this lens, Beardsley explores an impressive range of topics including literature, fiction, pictorial representation, criticism, and interpretation.

I first fell in love with Alex Grey’s art before I found his book that described his career and experiences that solidified the themes he has chosen to explore throughout his craft.

The Mission of Art was an incredible read that took me on a journey of art appreciation, self-discovery, and the concept of creativity. My favorite part of the book includes the illustrations and backstory behind their conception.

I appreciate that Alex reminded me and other readers that all art deserves to exist as evidence of humanity & culture and should not be limited to what is “good” or “bad,” but it should all be accepted for what it is. (Cause it says a lot about who we are as people and the current time we live in) 

The Art of Kind and Flowing Relationships helps you discover who you are and how you function from the agent Chinese Energy philosophy. The book also lets you understand how you see the world and how others perceive you.

From that angle, the author helps you to understand what you can do to understand other people and build solid and flowing relationships.  

I regularly go to this book to see how I can approach people differently by understanding them deeper, less about me and what I’m all about.

This book outlines how the visual field operates at a psychological level.

I am an architect and cannot believe that we don’t teach straight from this and other Arnheim books more often. If you want to know what is happening to you, why you get chills up your spine when looking at art, read this book.

Arnheim is a psychologist, not a designer, so he breaks art down from this perspective.

Nehamas’s lucid prose and lovely illustrations take us away from politics to a very different topic, our individual experience of art in all its many forms, from popular media to highfalutin forms, as an arena for the freedom of our imagination and taste.

I love Nehamas’s personal and personable voice, which cuts through centuries of theory to speak to the reader, one person to another. Few philosophy books are so accessible or have such beautiful pictures!

Because of his prior reputation as a metaphysician and epistemologist, when Nelson Goodman turned his attention to the philosophy of art, he lent unprecedented prestige to aesthetics. In his book, Goodman treats art as a matter of symbol systems whose major structures include representation, exemplification, and expression. Given his emphasis on symbolism, Goodman regarded artistic projects, like picturing, as conventional and he maintained that our conviction of the realism of pictorial representations was merely an affair of our habituation to various styles. Languages of Art is a book noteworthy for its bold and bracing literary style.