Sara Wilson McKay

1.58 Art And...: Thinking beyond Conventions towards Possibility (Paper)

Sara Wilson McKay – Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA

Abstract:

In the intersections, in the endless connections of art and its many territories – both related and unexpected, meaningfulness arises in the messiness of blurred boundaries. Troubling totality with an ever iterative and never complete understanding of our social experiences, be they in classrooms, in the health clinic, in the courts, in the public community, art asks us to explore how thinking otherwise, beyond conventions, might offer us possibility, some other version to be, in any one of these social spaces of experience. As Maxine Greene declared with her assertions of the value of social imagination, it is through the breaking with habitual ways of doing and perceiving that we can begin to imagine futures that are more just and equitable. In a global age of homogenizing cultural trends, including extremist politics trading in misinformation and trafficking human rights as if they are casually expendable commodities, the power of art and its importance should be leveraged to its fullest extent. Looking at contemporary artists and the way that they “and” beyond conventional ideas, this paper explores how artists activate new territories, pushing toward new and different social realities. Offering a theory of relational aesthetics that is less about social practice art and more about the practice of art for the social, this paper draws on over a decade of practice at the intersection of art education and healthcare. By examining these rich interdisciplinary experiences for lessons of social benefit, the author investigates how cultivating social imagination through the intersections of art and innumerable, ever-anding, other territories increase our capacity to generate ideas of “what should be and what might be in our deficient society” (Greene, 2000, p. 5).