Disruptive: Remarks

The title of the symposium¹ offers a point of entry for me in that I am, in a way, coming full circle today. My father was a student here at Howard in the 1960s.

I have intentionally decided to present my remarks here this morning without the support of images. Doing so—making these remarks without images—could be perceived as a form of disruption (of expectations), particularly at an art symposium.

I am not starting necessarily at the beginning but rather with my first response: a response to the complexities and implications of the charge for this session.

The 1940s, Viktor Lowenfeld joined the faculty at Penn State after causing a disruption at his previous institution, Hampton. The disruption Lowenfeld instigated was his insistence that his students—African American and Native American—paint and sculpt what they saw and knew. His students followed his instruction and, in essence, conveyed what they knew and saw and experienced with far too much visual accuracy and power for the administration—an administration that was not particularly interested in promoting critical visual engagements with issues of poverty, social injustice, racism, and so on. Disruption.

Part of the charge for this session was the idea that: “Higher educational institutions and professional schools that prepare graduates for arts-based research, program development, and leadership will necessitate research design and inquiry that is fundamentally different.” I believe this is a call for disruption, as disruptions have the power to change the foundations or fundamental nature of an experience or situation or mindset.

Challenging dominant hegemony through disruption. Disrupting expectations.

Disrupting assumptions. Disrupting narratives. Disruptions can be data. Disruptions can be instigations for data to appear or evolve. Disruptions can be means to expose data that will be analyzed later.

Arts-based research by African American artists should be disruptive. We/they should be used to that by now.

In K–12 education, with all of the emphasis on assessment and accountability, educators in the arts do not have the same restrictions or impositions faced by educators in other disciplines, which should be seen as an advantage and a call to be disruptive.

There is a difference between arts-based research and arts-based educational research. The latter is more specifically interested in the theoretical, conceptual, methodological, cultural, and social implications and intersections between art forms and education.

It is difficult to repair the mechanical system of a merry-go-round while riding it. It seems to me one might easily paint the merry-go-round while it is moving, and thereby alter the formal qualities of the device but not its foundational purpose.

Arts-based research methodologies are characteristically emergent, imagined, and derivative from an artist/researcher’s practice or arts praxis inquiry models; they are capable of yielding outcomes taking researchers in directions the sciences cannot go.

(Rolling, 2010, p. 102)

The artistic methodologies that inform the processes of visual culture production represented in the works in the 30 Americans exhibition are disruptive to varying degrees, but are not all disruptive in the same ways. Context, content, historical time frame, medium, subject matter, and other factors influence the degree of disruption embodied in each approach. Of course, in this country, there is a history of assumed disruptive behavior whenever black folks gather to speak their minds, engage in cultural production, or challenge hegemony.

Where must disruption in graduate research occur? Right now. Right here. Anywhere. Anytime. One might begin with an examination of, and counter-narrative to, elements of conventional research structures by reconsidering and emphasizing the methodologies within them: problem statements, research questions, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, presentation, recommendations. At some level, an entire overhaul of such conventions would need to be addressed; if not, the disruptions to the formal conventional structures would merely be like painting the merry-go-round and then saying the merry-go-round was a completely different merry-go-round.

The charge for this session also included a request “to pose the question of journeys, inquiries, and investigational processes from the perspective of the artist.” In response, artists might re-imagine (artistic and creative) journeys...