Ground
Works

here-ing is an environmentally embedded artwork by Janine Antoni commissioned by the Spencer Museum's Arts Research Integration (ARI) program in collaboration with the University of Kansas Field Station and School of Architecture & Design. Working across architecture, art, audiology, and environmental science, this project offers embodied and culturally responsive practices, including place-based and artistic research methods, for reconstructing healthier native grasslands and understanding the ecological relationship between the environment and human body. here-ing is a three-acre labyrinth stretching across three former farm fields and designed in the shape of the anatomy of the human ear. The creation of here-ing was a multi-year process that began with a prescribed burn, plotting the design into the fields, and carving a large-scale finger labyrinth onto a native limestone boulder placed at the trailhead to orient visitors and increase accessibility. Visitor footsteps on the labyrinth trail create and maintain the path for those who come after them. If the path ceases to be walked, it will be reclaimed by the tallgrass prairie and only remain through story. Visitor participation in creating the piece ultimately demonstrates the nature of good land stewardship: a committed relationship to nature and place that bridges diverse cultures to better nurture the land. Since its inception in 2021, here-ing has continued to evolve through public participation, re-seeding, and ongoing workshops and education around collaborative Indigenous-led cultural burns to stimulate healthy native species regeneration.

Art should be integral to research, education, and expressing lived experiences. Podcasts, animations, spoken word, video games, and multimodal, born-digital books can be modalities of learning and teaching that decolonize representations, especially when they are founded on deep collaboration. Coming out of IRIE Center (Innovative Research and Intercultural Education), a group of scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, K-12 schools, and community leaders, collectively called The Collaboratory, facilitates research that is timely, evocative, and critical to understanding a fuller history of the Americas. The Collaboratory’s goals are to push the boundaries of grant-funded research, public humanities, and arts-integrated education.

This article highlights two overlapping projects from the past six years. The first is a Decolonizing Representations workshop series that began in 2019 and used Evocative Ethnography including communal experiences of art, critical art making, and deep collaboration to achieve four goals: 1) excavate hidden stories, 2) learn about techniques and concepts like Evocative Ethnography and Afrofuturism, 3) critically create art together and therein bond across cultural differences, and 4) craft evocative products such that content becomes accessible to a larger, public audience. Expanding on these four goals, IRIE Center partnered with WUFT at the University of Florida (UF) College of Journalism on the second project: creating a podcast series Decolonizing Representations: Evoking the Hidden Histories of Black Lives in Florida through a Lens of Afrofuturism. The last episode of the series integrated African American Studies high school students in the process of archival research and podcast creation. These kinds of deep collaborations bring together university scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, librarians, public school systems, K-12 students, museums, and local community organizations and leaders. This work is continuing to develop into animations, a documentary television series, and video games.