ART & CARE

From Crisis to Creativity and Care: A Transformational Promise

Join us at the Practicing Care Through Art Exhibition at the  Cambridge Festival: March 28- April 2, 2025. 

LATEST: Our special issue Art for the Sake of Care is available for download at the International Journal of Education and the Arts. Discover the innovative and transformative work of more than 30 artists-academics on care. Together, they showcase creativity and making as powerful forces driving meaningful change. The issue is the culmination of five years of collaboration in the Art & Care Platform Series. ✨ ✨ Click here to read and download the Full issue (Open Access) published by the International Journal of Education and the Arts.

We’re thankful to all authors who collaborated in showcasing their work: Biljana C. Fredriksen, Ana Sarvanovic, Jen Clarke, Marta Stefanyshyn, Keren Moscovitch, Tamar Amiri-Savitzky, Aagje Swinnen, Elena Cologni, Merel Visse, Deborah Krall, Suzanne Siegel, Laura Silagi, Zsuzsi Soboslay, Ryan Woodring, Truus Teunissen, Annette Hendrikx, Susan Woelders, Tineke Abma, Marloeke van der Vlugt, Sarah Campbell, Robyn Dowlen, John Keady, James Thompson, Anna Macdonald, Tom Maassen, Nieke Koek, Ian Nesbitt, Natalie Pace, Pieter Dronkers, Mona-Lisa Angell, Rachel Epp Buller, Nisha Gupta, Christine Leroy, Marlou Otten, and more to follow, such as Marielle Schuurman and Gabi Scardi.

About the Art and Care Platform Series

Through research, pedagogy and community-based practices, the Art & Care platform aims at facilitating a conversation while welcoming new collaborators, institutions, local communities and collectives on ways in which creative, practice-led research and care ethics & theory can impact society. With responsibility, creativity, and innovation coming from practices of care for the environment, society, heritage and art.

ART & CARE is a collaboration between Dr. Elena Cologni, Cambridge School of Art (Anglia Ruskin University, UK), and Dr. Merel Visse (Drew University, USA and University of Humanistic Studies, Care Ethics, NL). The series explores past, present and future views and practices of art and care. Some say care is a paradigm, a grand beholding, as in an ethos and others, such as Joan Tronto and María Puig de la Bellacasa define care as everything that is done to maintain, continue, and repair ‘the world’ so that all can live in it as well as possible. That world includes… all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. Dutch care ethicists view care as an interdisciplinary inquiry to understand the moral good in care. Emphasizing the concept of care as a performative praxis and a paradigm, this platform builds upon the rich body of scholarship in the fields of care ethics and practice-led, artistic research on care.

The platform aims to facilitate post-disciplinary conversations through the lens of creative, practice-led, and care research by being inclusive to different approaches to knowledge development. The platform covers a range of topics: care for the environment and ecologies, care for wellbeing, sustainability, care for race, class, gender, and other categories of identities, care for communities, heritage, archives, and conservation, education, and creative pedagogy.