The landscape is so vast that it takes a second for me to realize that the woman hiking towards me is carrying a huge backpack. She pauses, turns, and drops the pack off of her shoulder. Things are pulled out, one by one: long pieces of wood and containers and folded pieces of fabric. Out here, such an exposition is fairly common: with a hundred plus researchers nearby each summer, there’s a constant shuffling of gear to and from experiments. But then, out of the pack, come paintbrushes and tubes of oil. Klara Maisch is here to paint.
Maisch is a participant in the In a Time of Change program, an offshoot of the Bonanza Creek LTER that encourages artists to explore science through their work. The program, now gearing up for its eighth iteration, connects artists with a wide variety of research at the LTER site and beyond. Using their experience at the site as inspiration, artists produce creative work—visual art, dance pieces, or writing —that draw on the landscape and place-based science.
In a Time of Change, or ITOC, is one of many art-science programs across the LTER Network, and it is also one of the longest running. ITOC has connected dozens, maybe even hundreds, of artists with the research at the Bonanza Creek and Arctic LTER sites and beyond through field trips, residencies, and events. Thousands of audience members have seen the art, performance, and stories produced by participants in the program. Since 2013, evaluating this engagement, as well as documenting the collaborative dynamics between artists, scientists, and place, has been a central part of the ITOC program, leading to publications on informal learning and the nature of interdisciplinarity.
LTERs are not required to support art-science programs, though nearly all LTER sites do host some sort of art-science collaboration. A deep dive into the In a Time of Change program can provide insight into how and why the arts might be relevant for the LTER mission and why so many sites invest in art-science integration.
If you build it, they will come
With a cohort of motivated artists all eager to incorporate science into their work, ITOC focuses on providing the right structure during each program for incredible work to emerge. First, each iteration has a broad theme. In the largest iteration of ITOC, Boreal Forest Stories, forty four artists spent a year and a half producing work centered around narrative in the boreal forest. Past themes included Microbial Worlds, and The Art of Fire.
The program then puts artists and scientists together. In Boreal Forest Stories, artists met with scientists to learn about their research first virtually, an artifact of the pandemic, but then through field trips to research sites. Of course, the reality is that Mary Beth Leigh, a professor of microbiology and art-science integration at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who has run the program since 2013, puts enormous effort into recruiting cohorts of artists, maintaining relationships with scientists, and refining the program. But once the artists and scientists are together, inspiration takes hold.
The in-person field trips in Boreal Forest Stories included visits to the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest, a burn scar near Fairbanks, and the former residence of Bonanza Creek LTER cofounder Les Viereck. There, the artists met with scientists and other members working at each site. With those visits as inspiration, the artists were free to run with whatever concept they found most interesting from their visits.
Guidelines for the artists are intentionally flexible, says Leigh. The goal, she continues, is to let science break out of its own mold, to let scientific work be reshaped and reinterpreted by an outside perspective. For Maisch, that outside perspective has been a centerpoint of her career as an artist. “I think that as a non-scientist, I’m not afraid to ask silly questions that a lot of the public are also wondering,” she explains. “Through visual language and by working alongside scientific teams, I can filter their knowledge in a different way. I’m trained as a storyteller.”
Gail Priday, a multimedia visual artist who’s participated in several iterations of ITOC, agrees that the flexibility is paramount to the program’s success. “I think it’s really important to me and a lot of the other artists that the art comes first,” she says. “[The art is] based on science but infused with imagination. People can look at [the art] and then say, oh, maybe I want to know more about the science.”
Getting the art to the public, then, is a critical component of ITOC. Each iteration exhibits at a number of venues in Alaska, and since 2017 the exhibits have also traveled to the lower 48 and even Europe. “Wonder or curiosity or care can translate through arts and humanities in a way that gets people to then want to learn the science or go to the place to create their own connection,” says Lissy Goralnik, a professor at Michigan State University who co-facilitates ITOC and directs the research and evaluation.
Impact far and wide
On a frigid night in Fairbanks, at over ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit, work from the Microbial Worlds project showed at a First Friday event in a local gallery. The room was packed. Over nine hundred people showed up—2.5% of Fairbanks. “Even the gallery owner, who’s a long time professional artist, said ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’,” reflects Leigh. The packed show is great evidence that these arts-science collaborations can draw in the public in a way science alone cannot.
But for Goralnik, attendance numbers aren’t a satisfying mark of success. Broadly, Goralnik studies the ways place relationships—the sentimental, practical, psychological, and social meaning that places hold—catalyze care and responsibility for landscapes, communities, and the interplay between them. For her, ITOC programming is effective if the audience feels something when they engage with the art, the artists, and the community. She and Leigh hope ITOC exhibits spark curiosity, wonder, or care, and that they hold the audience’s attention in a way that fosters or deepens a personal connection with the boreal forest. .
Goralnik studies the link between the audience and the environment primarily through audience surveys at the ITOC shows, which they have been collecting in some form since the Trophic Cascades program in 2013. Recent surveys ask attendees about their perceptions of the boreal forest before and after the exhibit; how their experience at the exhibit has impacted knowledge, appreciation, and curiosity related to the exhibit content, the boreal forest, science, and art; and how their interactions during the exhibit impacted their experience.
The results from Boreal Forest Stories exhibit were fascinating. As the shows traveled away from Fairbanks to mountainous Cordova and ocean-fringed Homer, the audience became significantly less familiar with or connected to the boreal forest. Yet the surveys revealed that the art had a huge capacity to foster a connection to the boreal in those more distant communities: 98% of respondents in Homer, for example, said they felt much more connected to the forest after the show. Even more interesting is that in Fairbanks, where three quarters of the participants identified the boreal forest as their home landscape, more than 72% of survey participants said they felt more connected to the forest after visiting the Boreal Forest Stories exhibit. The show made the familiar unfamiliar for home audiences, and it made the unfamiliar familiar for distant audiences. That, says Goralnik, demonstrates the art has an impact across groups.
And that’s just from one exhibit, from one ITOC program. These small interventions, says Goralnik, add up over time. “Our surveys show that the audience definitely feels something” during these shows, she says. “They describe empathy, awe, love, fear, connection, and concern. With repeated interactions, as we’ve been having in Fairbanks for 15 years, 18 years at this point, this kind of feeling can build toward actual behavior change”, including increased support and awareness of science. ITOC has yet to study the long-term impacts of the program in the community, but this is a goal as they continue to explore the ways arts integration contributes to Bonanza Creek and LTER objectives.
Art, Goralnik thinks, is a particularly good vehicle for making people care. “What I’ve seen from our data is that audiences like learning science from the artists,” she explains. “They like to learn about how the artists learned from the scientists, like hearing about the experience in the field. I think it might have to do with an expertise buffer of sorts, a more accessible entry to the content. The artists are less intimidating.“
Reciprocal knowledge
“I got really excited about methane bubbles,” textile artist Ree Nancarrow says, remembering her visit to a frozen lake during the 2017 Microbial Worlds iteration of ITOC. Priday had a similar experience in Microbial worlds. “Since then, I’m just kind of obsessed with lichen,” she says, noting that one research visit opened her eyes to the organisms.
Those spurts of inspiration were a direct result of an artist with an open mind finding a scientist passionate about their work. That collaboration is key to ITOC, and Goralnik is also curious about how to make those types of interactions more common. A large part of her work is studying the artist-scientist collaborations in the program and trying to understand what makes the most successful ones click, and why. “My hypothesis is that the deeper the relationship between the scientists and the artists, the more true the storytelling will emerge in the art, because the story will evolve over time” she says. “But collaboration is relational and the process is really important. There are qualities that make people good collaborators, and program dynamics that can support effective collaboration, too.” Since 2013 she has been conducting interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires with artists and scientists in ITOC programs to explore the nature and dynamics of effective collaborations and collaborative environments.
She and Leigh take these results and feed them back into subsequent programs. For example, when the group went to Toolik Field Station (Arctic LTER) for the Microbial Worlds iteration, the artists and scientists had 10 hours of unstructured time in the bus on either end of the visit—unstructured time that was not part of earlier ITOC iterations, which did not feature such an intensive retreat. Leigh and Goralnik’s data showed that the unstructured time contributed to deeper connections between the artists and scientists. “They built relationships and learned a lot more about the science, which then sparked new ideas,” says Leigh. “And so we thought, oh, this is what we need to do. And that was really a huge breakthrough.” The following iterations of ITOC have intentionally built in more unstructured time for this kind of relationship building.
The latest ITOC project was a follow on to Boreal Forest Stories, entitled Boreal Echoes. Though Stories ran for a year and a half, most of the residency took place online during the pandemic, which meant little time for in-person relationship building. Following the program several artists shared that they were just getting started and had more work they wanted to explore, and that they enjoyed returning to the recorded Zoom presentations to enrich their understanding of the science. So Leigh and Goralnik convened a smaller cohort of 13 artists from the Stories roster and spent and additional year deepening their relationships with each other and the forest through monthly cohort ‘making’ activities and field trips. An exhibit of their work opened in fall 2024 and is now touring in Alaska.
And still, Leigh and Goralnik think the relationships can be deeper. In the upcoming iteration of ITOC, three artists will embed with a wildfire research team for several years of field work. This hyper targeted version of ITOC is intended to maximize relationship building. Whether it will generate the kind of collaboration Leigh and Goralnik hope for remains to be seen—but it’s an exciting experiment.
Credit: Ian Stepanek, used with permission.
Goralnik sees ITOC’s experiments as a way to begin to build the context for best practices for other field-based art-science programs. “There is little empirical work in this area,” she explains, “but the theoretical work about the impacts of these kinds of integrative activities is quite persuasive. We want to demonstrate what works, how, and for whom, so we can make a real contribution to our communities.” By studying the ITOC program, she and Leigh can build a roadmap to stronger art-science collaborations that others, including other LTER sites and beyond, can use to develop their own programs.
Catalyzing change
With such a strong track record of success, it might seem like ITOC is close to reaching its full potential. But Leigh thinks that art-science collaboration has much more to give. Primarily, she notes, collaboration in ITOC is still fairly one-directional, where science informs the art. But what if the exchange were more bi-directional? What could the program—or humanity—accomplish if it were the norm to integrate perspectives across the arts, sciences, humanities, and beyond? “Something as big as climate change, these seemingly intractable issues, require the attention of a wide and inclusive multidisciplinary perspective,” says Leigh, noting that making progress on these global human-ecological problems will require the kind of boundary pushing thinking made possible by open-minded and creative collaboration.
Through place-based, relationship-centered integrative activities, ITOC aims to support this kind of thinking, and Leigh shared a few examples of collaborations that have opened up new ways of knowing. One comes from her own experience, when she was buried in the tundra in Norway while wearing a dress her design collaborator made for an art piece about decomposition, part of an NSF-funded study about Arctic microbes. “You know, I suddenly perceived just how cold the soil is,” she remembers. “Even though I had measured it with a probe, I hadn’t really fully investigated how much the microbes are doing in the soil. It’s that cold.” That experience made her think about her own research on microbes from a new perspective.
Ultimately, ITOC hopes to move from an interdisciplinary to a more transdisciplinary model, where they are working with communities toward place-based change through art-science-community partnerships. “It’s kind of the holy grail,” explains Leigh, “and we’re slowly working in that direction.”
Why the LTER?
One of the strengths of the ITOC program, especially in the LTER, is its durability. The Bonanza Creek LTER has been active since 1987. Over that time, Bonanza Creek has become deeply embedded in the Fairbanks community, and vice versa. Similarly, the ITOC program has been an integral part of both the Bonanza Creek LTER program and the Fairbanks community since 2007. In this time, Leigh has grown a group of committed artists who have become friends, collaborators, curators, and ITOC advisors, as well as partnerships with organizations, photographers, educators, and galleries around the state. This kind of relationship building is possible because and nurtured by the commitment to long-term inquiry.
“When you look at the mission of the LTER, it’s really clear that things like community engagement and broader impacts of long-term change are included,” says Leigh. “There are all these elements of the original mission that you really need the arts and humanities to achieve.” Goralnik agrees. “A lot of what we’re hearing is that the arts and humanities can do the work that the scientists want their work to do, can get people excited about landscapes and care about big ideas, but it’s not always possible within the voice of science to do,” says Goralnik. Perhaps that’s why so many LTER sites have art-science programs—with In a Time of Change being one shining example.
For those interested in learning more about In a Time of Change or Art-Science collaboration at the LTER, please reach out to Mary Beth Leigh (mbleigh@alaska.edu) or Lissy Goralnik (goralnik@msu.edu).
by Gabriel De La Rosa
