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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Call for Proposals

General Call for Submissions

Rolling Submissions

Cripping Creativity & Play: Artist-Led Explorations of Disabled Art-Making

Submit by January 30, 2026

Special Issue: Cripping Creativity & Play: Artist-Led Explorations of Disabled Art-Making

Guest editor: Dr. Elizabeth McLain

Ground Works launches its Reco(r)ding CripTech online archive...

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Announcements

Ground Works Pilots CRediT-FAIR Framework for Non-Authorial Contributions
December 2, 2024

Ground Works staff has adapted the NISO (National Information Standards Organization) Contributor Roles Taxonomy, known as CRediT.

CRediT has gained traction in sc...

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Featured Articles

Prairie Block: Designing and Building Community Resilience in the Heartland

Suzan Hampton and Keith Van de Riet

Design for community resilience requires a multi-dimensional approach addressing the three pillars of sustainable development: social, economic, and environmental. The Prairie Block project in Lawrence, Kansas integrated all three pillars in a novel way to generate a replicable model of sustainable design that can be used in other communities.

Within the context of a U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-identified low-moderate income neighborhood, vanguard public, private, nonprofit, and institutional partnerships were facilitated by university design-build architecture students, faculty, and a community leader. Through this constellation of partners, a formerly under-utilized park was transformed in five months and with zero budget into a thriving neighborhood landmark complete with a community orchard, shade structure, walking trails, and creek access.

The catalyst of this revitalized public amenity is Kaw Pavilion, an artistic shade structure fabricated by the students that honors the area’s Indigenous and other early inhabitants while celebrating the neighborhood’s iconoclastic character and strong activist identity.

Other park improvements include a 35-tree free-fruit community orchard and walking trails, with prairie plants and carved limestone benches, that connect the playground and the creek. Subsequent park additions include a new splash pad, public restroom, and bus stop. The park now serves as a node on a trail network that connects all the neighborhoods in Lawrence.

Prairie Block strengthens a sense of place and fosters sustainability on economic, social, and environmental levels by pulling together shared history, present-day neighborhood identity, and connections to the rest of the city. The Parks and Recreation Department is replicating this partnership and multi-faceted design model in other low-moderate income neighborhoods on the trail system.

November 2024 · 10.48807/2024.0.0146 · CC-BY

Translating Outcomes: Reflections on ArtPlace America’s Cross Sector Research

Jamie Hand

ArtPlace America (ArtPlace) was a ten-year collaboration among a number of foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions that supported the field of creative placemaking – the intentional integration of arts, culture, and community-engaged design strategies into the process of equitable community planning and development. Within this mandate, ArtPlace conducted the “Translating Outcomes” research initiative from 2015 to 2020 – an incremental, segmented approach to building creative placemaking knowledge for and with a diverse range of community development practitioners. Recognizing that comprehensive community development is composed of many professional disciplines, ArtPlace identified ten segments of the field that are often separated out as distinct municipal agencies, university departments, or funding streams: Agriculture & Food, Economic Development, Environment & Energy, Health, Housing, Immigration, Public Safety, Transportation, Workforce Development, and Youth Development. The Translating Outcomes research design took this segmentation as its road map and set out to analyze, make legible, and give language to how arts and cultural practitioners have long been partners in helping to achieve each of these sectors’ goals. For each of the ten sectors, ArtPlace engaged countless partners to conduct research, convene cross-sector working groups, publish field scans, and create resources specific to each sector. The effort was explicitly participatory, designed to elevate the knowledge and expertise of community residents, artists, and community development practitioners through interviews, convenings, and research review. As a hybrid institution straddling funding, policy, advocacy, and grassroots spheres, ArtPlace occupied a unique and privileged platform that allowed it to catalyze multidisciplinary research and action at the scale of this initiative. After providing a review of the published outputs and the work it has seeded in other sectors, I share in the following a reflection on both the conditions required to cultivate such cross-sector communities of practice and the opportunities for further scholarship that may impact vibrant ecologies of research.

August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.0.0091 · CC-BY-NC

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

Featured Commentaries

This dialogue developed over several months between guest editor Aaron Knochel and Leonardo Executive Editor Roger Malina regarding the special collection Vibrant Ecologies of Research. Key publications and projects are jumping-off points for this wide-ranging discussion.

August 2022 · 10.48807/2022.1.0010 · CC-BY-NC

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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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