LAWRENCE – The Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas has received a $3 million gift from Kansas City donor Margaret H. Silva to endow Arts Research Integration (ARI), an innovative initiative that brings artists into a wide range of research processes through interdisciplinary collaboration. In addition, Silva has offered to support a challenge grant, led by the Spencer Museum, up to another $1 million in financial support for the initiative. These gifts build on Silva’s previous contributions to ARI, which began in 2018, and recognize the significance of the initiative to make art central to the study and manifestation of ideas. The gift is essential to promote ARI’s work on current projects, including those with artists Janine Antoni, Simon Denny and Stephanie Dinkins, and to ensure ARI’s future as an incubator for new research methods as well as for model development new for how museums can. engage with artists and communities. Silva’s gift will be administered through the KU Endowment, the foundation that supports KU.
The Spencer Museum first established ARI in 2016 with a four-year grant from the Mellon Foundation. The initiative allowed the Spencer to embed artists directly in the high-level research taking place at KU, enhancing the university’s research ecology by positioning art-making as a vital research methodology in its own right – one that is essential to breaking down barriers and supporting the public’s understanding of topical and relevant topics. At the core of the initiative are public engagement opportunities that support information sharing and encourage greater community participation. Recent projects completed through ARI include a collaboration between artist Janet Biggs, then-KU mathematician Agnieszka Międlar and KU physicist Daniel Tapia Takaki, who also leads a team at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Their work explored questions in high energy physics and applied new mathematical techniques to video production and performance, resulting in an exhibition and numerous public and academic talks in the United States and abroad. These types of projects emphasize process and dialogue, leaving plenty of room to discover and open up traditional research patterns to new structures and methods.
“ARI brings artists together with researchers, scholars, teachers and students to explore topics that are deeply relevant to our lives and communities and, in doing so, makes creative practices central to the process of inquiry and innovation. It’s very much about moving beyond conversations about the importance of art to making art part of the study and exploration of our world and an integral part of addressing pressing issues,” said Joey Orr, Mellon Research Curator ARI. “We are extremely grateful to Margaret Silva for her continued support and for her influential endowment gift, which will allow ARI to continue to grow and develop well into the future.”
“I am delighted to continue to support ARI’s important work at the Spencer,” said Silva. “Art and artists have an amazing way of asking big questions, challenging contemporary and old-fashioned thinking, driving change and creating solutions for seemingly intractable problems. I have been proud to support bold, provocative and progressive art projects over many years and I continue that personal mission with my contributions to this initiative. I look forward to engaging with the many upcoming projects and ideas that will emerge from ARI’s exciting work.”
ARI builds on a long history of ambitious, interdisciplinary initiatives and projects at the Spencer Museum. As early as the 1970s, museum leaders began advocating for educational models that integrated art across the study of the curriculum. An innovative vision for the role of the arts at the time, this approach has become standard in many universities across the United States. Over the decades, the Spencer Museum has continued to pioneer its vision of connecting art with science, technology and the humanities, using its resources to establish new ways of learning. In recent history, this has led to programs such as Hybrid Practices, an international conference in 2015 that featured a wide spectrum of speakers and performance and creative projects that focused on collaborative research into the arts, science and technology of the 50 previous years. The conference was the culmination of three years of work, led by Saralyn Reece Hardy, Director of Spencer’s Marilyn Stokstad; Celka Straughn, Mellon’s Director of Academic Programs; and Stephen Goddard, the museum’s senior curator at the time.
“The Spencer has long believed that the arts have a major role to play in shaping policy, developing new technologies, and engaging and connecting with the natural and built world around us. Art has the power to move us and bring us together. It offers different ways of looking, thinking and experiencing that are essential to discovery and progress. ARI is part of a long-standing path of interdisciplinary and collaborative work led by the Spencer, and we are so grateful to Margaret for her endowment gift which secures and ensures this ongoing work at the museum,” said Reece Hardy. “While ARI has focused in recent years on contemporary art and artists, the long-term vision for the initiative is to activate the entire museum and its collections, across time and culture. Margaret’s incredible contribution is essential to this growth.”
ARI is currently involved in two ongoing projects with artists. One connects New York-based Bahamian artist Janine Antoni with researchers at the KU Field Station at the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research. The Field Station offers more than 3,700 acres of diverse native and managed habitats available for emerging research. For the project, Antoni is focusing particularly on the prairie ecosystem, one of the most diverse and endangered ecosystems outside of the rainforest and one that is nearly extinct across the United States. Antoni, whose artistic practice actively engages with the body, works with researchers to make connections between the complexity of the prairie environment and the human body. In particular, she is creating a labyrinth on land in the form of the anatomy of the human ear which will invite people to walk a path and reflect on topics such as human anatomy, listening, embodiment, ecological systems, wildlife and cultural history. The project began last spring with prescribed field burning, a natural process that rejuvenates the prairie, with the support of Field Station researchers. Antoni joined this important ecological restoration with a ritual experience for the public that allowed them to identify with the land through acts of personal healing. When humans form a reciprocal relationship with the earth, both humans and the environment can thrive. At the heart of the project is an invitation to the public to return to the body by being closely involved with the land.
“I do my best work when I have the flexibility to respond to my own process,” says Antoni. “The land tells us something, and I respond. Part of what is special about my work through ARI is the opportunity to respect the process and listen to all our human colleagues and others.”
ARI is also currently working with Brooklyn-based artist Stephanie Dinkins, Berlin-based artist Simon Denny and AT&T Institute Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering Perry Alexander & Computer science, on a project that uses blockchain technology. The project is a collaboration with the Institute of Information Sciences, one of the largest research centers at KU, and The History of Black Writing, a research unit committed to restoration work in Black literary studies. The commission is supported in part by a grant from Silicon Valley finance company Ripple. Some of the group’s core interests include challenging the technology’s claim to ensure timelines and means of discussion with poetic disruptions to history and sparking conversations about parallel history, reparations, technology, art and more.
Margaret H. Silva, a philanthropist and arts advocate, has supported the work of artists for more than three decades. A native of Mid Wales, her passion is the result of a lifelong engagement with art and artists and a belief in the power and significance of experiences and creative endeavours. In 1995, he founded and funded Grand Arts, a non-profit contemporary art space in Kansas City. Over a period of 20 years, Grand Arts helped more than 100 national and international artists to realize dynamic and provocative projects and foster dialogue and new thinking about big picture social issues and questions. Although Grand Arts closed in 2015 and Silva formally retired, the ethos of the organization lives on in a new endeavor called Fathomers, launched by Grand Arts associates and collaborators. Since then, Silva has continued to support the arts through his philanthropy.
KU Endowment is the independent, not-for-profit organization that serves as the official fundraising and fund management organization for KU. Established in 1891, KU Endowment was the first foundation of its kind at a public university in the US.
Top image: CERN ARI project. Credit: Ryan Waggoner, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas.
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