CAS Research & Practice


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Research and Practice

The Center for the Arts in Society supports the research and practice of individual members and coordinates research projects that extend across disciplinary boundaries. The Center encourages team research projects, just as it encourages team teaching, assuming that conversations prompt further inquiries into the significance of crossing disciplinary boundaries. The Center also sponsors collaborative projects that involve Center members, colleagues from the University, and colleagues from outside the University. These projects are designed to open access to the general public for discussions of art, of art in society, and of the impact that art and artists have on cultural revival and economic renewal.

Read more about Center member projects, the Faculty Grant Program, and Center Workshops.

Research Book
The Center produced a Research Book containing a sample of the innovative research of our faculty. To receive a complimentary copy of the book, please email Anna Houck (am2x@andrew.cmu.edu).

The Center announces its forthcoming book, (Im)permanence: Cultures In/Out of Time (Carnegie Mellon and Penn State University Press). The collection of essays offers diverse perspectives on the tensions between permanence and impermanence in interpretations of art and artifacts in cultures around the world and throughout history. Contributors include artists, anthropologists, curators, historians, critics, philosophers, and photographers, who offer unique perspectives on art and time. The contributions transcend disciplinary boundaries and break new ground in questioning the value of preserving, archiving, saving, and sanctifying the work of an artist, a community, a nation, or an international body.

Can curators and archivists reconcile the goal of preservation with an artist's insistence that transience is the heart of her work?
Does the persistence of cultural artifacts representing one regime challenge the power of another?
Who or what groups should have access to the preserved remnants of past cultural traditions?
Do technological developments radically change the meaning and perception of art in diverse cultural contexts?

(Im)permanence: Cultures In/Out of Time presents a dialogue between disciplines, between practitioners and theorists, and between image and text, that will prompt new conversations in the academy, art institutions, and the general public.

The book is available from the Penn State University Press.