Being an A-R-T-I-S-T: Challenges and Opportunities of Connecting  Art, Research, Transformation, Imagery & StoryTelling

girija kaimal

Arts based research enables me to bring together my identities as an artist, a researcher, an educator, life story teller, and, immigrant from India to the United States. In this paper, I present my experiences with creating an artistic representation of immigrant narratives focusing specifically on a controversial visa to the United States called the H1B. The artwork was created in response to a call from the Smithsonian Asian and Pacific American Center’s first community exhibition on Indian American heritage. I used a mixed methods approach bringing together narrative methods with arts based approaches, namely, researching, storytelling and artmaking. Integrating the methods was a challenge as I struggled to find alignment between artistic representation and narrative storytelling. A potential bridge was the active evocation of imagery in the narratives that then helped build a bridge to the elements of the final artwork. The artwork was shared in a group exhibition in a gallery and will be part of a future online site in the hope of sparking broader social awareness and transformative thinking. The responses to the artwork and narratives at the exhibition added a new level of dialogue and exchange that was beyond the scope of each methodological approach alone. The experience posed several questions on the intersection of arts-based research with other paradigms. Challenges identified included the bridging data and analytic strategies in different methods. Identified opportunities include having an expanded audience, transformative means of access, generating awareness about previously unknown issues and extended engagement.

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