Puhlkari by Kira Bhumber. Photographer: Andrew Howell. Used with permission

Ground Works is a platform for exemplary arts-inclusive research projects and reflection on the processes that drive interdisciplinary collaboration.

Latest Collection

Creating Knowledge in Common

Editors: Shannon Criss, Kevin Hamilton, and Mary Pat McGuire

Universities and communities are partnering together to more fully support needs across society. Art and design practices engaged within these partnerships substantively deepen the impact of this collective work through expression, visualization, representation, and exhibition, converging multiple viewpoints into broader re-imaginings and tangible new creations with both rational and emotional force. This special collection shares stories of such partnerships and their extraordinary outcomes in areas including community health, community arts, placekeeping, climate adaptation design, food production and distribution, abolition, student learning and engagement and more.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.2.0002 · CC-BY-NC-ND

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Announcements

Ground Works Releases Second Special Edition: Creating Knowledge in Common
November 14, 2024

Ground Works is excited to launch its latest special edition, Creating Knowledge in Common, featuring academic community/partnerships that center the arts and design. The projects in this colle...

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Featured Articles

New Americans’ Pavilion: A Space of Cosmopolitan Cooperation in Syracuse, New York

David Shanks

The New Americans’ Pavilion at Salt City Harvest Farm (SCHF) is an interdisciplinary community-university partnered design project that supports food sovereignty for refugees in Syracuse, New York. The building is an important social hub for the refugee diaspora, and also a research testbed for an innovative off-the-grid, solar-powered cold storage system that is intended to become a model for small community farms. Syracuse is home to more than ten thousand refugees, with origins ranging from Somalia to Bhutan to Cambodia. Many refugees live in areas of the city with limited access to a variety of fresh food. SCHF was established in 2014 to provide the refugee community with farmland where they can grow the kinds of food they want to eat, as well as educational programs where they can learn to farm and bring their produce to market. In 2020, SCHF began a collaboration with faculty and students at Syracuse University to design and build the New Americans’ Pavilion. The pavilion includes covered space for washing, packing, and storing produce from the farm, as well as flexible space for dining and educational events. The building was designed and constructed over a three-year period by a team comprising university faculty and students, community volunteers, professional contractors, and Salt City Harvest Farm staff. The project was supported by funding from the Chobani® Community Impact Fund, the Central New York Community Foundation, the Reisman Foundation, and an Innovative and Interdisciplinary Research Grant from Syracuse University.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0131 · CC-BY

Apothecarts: Mobilizing Abolition

Emilie Taylor Welty, Jackie Sumell, and Jose Cotto

How can design start a conversation and serve as a tool for advocacy and education? A team of artists, abolitionists, and architecture students combined efforts to answer this question through the design and fabrication of several mobile apothecaries, or “Apothecarts” for short. The Apothecarts challenge us to imagine a landscape without prisons by facilitating space for knowledge exchange and healing rooted in plant medicines grown at Solitary Gardens (the partnering non-profit). There are 2.2 million incarcerated people in the United States, and of those, around 90,000 are subjected to indefinite solitary confinement every day. The Apothecarts transform plants from Solitary Gardens into herbal teas and tinctures for communities most deeply impacted by the insidious reach of mass incarceration. This work is part of an ongoing effort at Tulane’s Small Center to expand design access, improve the design process, provide a design/build education and prepare a new generation of architects to create a more just world. Small Center is Tulane School of Architecture’s Community Design Center which includes design/build projects where students learn through making. This design/build process is an interdisciplinary collaboration that begins with interviews, area expert teach-ins, observation, and surveys as part of the project design phase. Students co-create design options that are presented to a core group of stakeholders. After a multi-stage feedback loop, students deliver a final built project, or in this case two small built projects. Since their debut in 2021, the carts have been part of multiple fairs, festivals, and events in their home city, and have sparked a conversation beyond New Orleans through inclusion in venues such as MOMA’s PS1 and in global design awards.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0149 · CC-BY-NC

Side by Side: Navigating the Messy Work of Staying Relational in University-Community Partnerships

Ann Holt and Cindy Maguire

This article describes community/university partnerships with ArtsAction Group’s work (AAG) situated in Kosovo, Western Sahara, and Sri Lanka and higher education partners in the US and UK. AAG is an international community-based arts collective (artsaction.org) that includes professional and student volunteer arts educators, art therapists, teaching artists, and educators. Our focus is with children and youth in conflict-affected environments impacted by trauma, violence, and/or efforts at cultural erasure. AAG centers arts and healing, to foster capabilities (Deneulin, 2009; Nussbaum, 2011; Maguire & McCallum, 2019) critical to functioning and healthy societies and to emphasize relationality (ethics and responsibility towards each other) and impact (self cultivation and responsibility together). AAG involves artful coalitions (Kay & Wolf, 2017) of people from different geographic, cultural, and social positioning. In this article, we share insights on the messiness of transnational, transdisciplinary collaborations. We discuss knowledge generated from experiences navigating the complexities existing in arts and cultural partnerships including the multiple egos, traditions, rules, bureaucracy, expectations, and roles that are entangled in the work– and impossible to avoid. We acknowledge these encounters as necessary pedagogic processes of learning, trust-building, letting go of control, teamwork, and community-building. We resist normative hierarchical community/university partnerships and practices that are ‘conflict averse.’ Staying with the trouble in solidarity forces one to work in unexpected collaborations and combinations which can spark creative solutions and new ways of approaching equitable, community-centered, research projects.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0140 · CC-BY-NC-ND

Featured Commentaries

Invited commentary on Vibrant Ecologies of Research

Cripping Media Art Ecologies

Lindsey D. Felt and Vanessa Chang

By remaking the creative design cycle through an accessibility and disability justice lens, Leonardo CripTech Incubator scaffolds new forms of artistic access. Bringing a disability justice lens to art-and-technology research practice and to this incubator’s design, we position ourselves as facilitators in this vibrant ecology, calling up other critical voices in this process. 

August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.1.0011 · CC-BY-NC-SA

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As early groundwork for Ground Works, a2ru invited submissions of interdisciplinary projects. Six of those projects played a seminal role in shaping the platform and helping to define the a2ru transdisciplinary space.

November 2020 · 10.48807/2022.1.0003

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