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Across higher education and in industry, the familiar acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) is morphing into STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics).

Why add art to the mix?

Because innovation and creativity are vitally important to our economy, and artists and designers are innovators and creators. They ask questions. They come up with unusual solutions to problems. They take risks.

Artists and designers are skilled at critical making as well as critical thinking – and that gives them common ground with engineers and chemists.

The STEAM initiative has its roots in a cooperative effort by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts to explore how they could better support innovation together. Both agencies have called for a renewed emphasis on the role of creative fields in scientific experimentation and the arts as a vehicle for disseminating and debating scientific knowledge.

At a recent conference on transforming STEM to STEAM, Shirley Malcom, Head of Education and Human Resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science asked, “Why choose just one? What was this artificial bifurcation [between art and science] and how can we reconnect it?”

Research universities are an essential forum for connecting art and science, in ways that are both structured and unstructured. STEAM happens every day on the UConn campus when:
* an engineering student takes a ceramics class or a painting student double-majors in physics
* sculptors and materials scientists on the faculty meet to discuss how they use computer-controlled routers
* a graduate student in studio art and a mathematics professor together design a microprocessor to support interactive art
* a visiting artist creates a multimedia work about the nature of time with collaborators from physics

To find out more about STEAM:

A new academic journal, STEAM, includes scholarly articles as well as reports from the field.

The President of RISD, John Maeda, recently wrote an opinion piece forWired magazine arguing for the value of the STEAM concept.

Art and Art History was pleased to co-sponsor Visiting Artist Favianna Rodriguez with El Instituto (Latin American and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies) in February 2013. Rodriguez conducted printmaking and poster workshops and spoke with students across campus during her visit in the newly renovated Bishop Center Studios.

Favianna Rodriguez is a celebrated printmaker and digital artist based in Oakland, California. Using high-contrast colors and vivid figures, her composites reflect literal and imaginative migration, global community, and interdependence.

Rodriguez is renown for her vibrant posters dealing with issues such as war, immigration, globalization, and social movements. By creating lasting popular symbols – where each work is the multiplicand and its location the multiplier – her work interposes private and public space, as the art viewer becomes the participant carrying art beyond the borders of the museum.

Rodriguez has lectured widely on the use of art in civic engagement and the work of artists who, like herself, are bridging the community and museum, the local and international. Rodriguez’s has worked closely with artists in Mexico, Europe, and Japan, and her works appear in collections at Bellas Artes (Mexico City), The Glasgow Print Studio (Glasgow, Scotland), and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles).

Latina magazine recently published this interview with Rodriguez.

Rodriguez has exhibited at Museo del Barrio (New York); de Young Museum (San Francisco); Mexican Fine Arts Center (Chicago); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); Sol Gallery (Providence, RI); Huntington Museum and Galería Sin Fronteras (Austin, TX); and internationally at the House of Love & Dissent (Rome), Parco Museum (Tokyo), as well as in England, Belgium, and Mexico. She was a 2005 artist-in-residence at San Francisco’s prestigious de Young Museum, a 2007-2008 artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA), and received a 2006 Sea Change Residency from the Gaea Foundation (Provincetown, MA). Rodriguez is recipient of a 2005 award from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

As a teacher, Rodriguez has conducted workshops and presentations at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles), El Faro de Oriente (Mexico), de Young Museum (San Francisco), the Habana Hip Hop Festival (Habana, Cuba), as well as Williams College and The Commonwealth Club. In 2003, she co-founded the Taller Tupac Amaru printing studio to foster resurgence in the screenprinting medium. She is co-founder of the EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA) and Visual Element, both programs dedicated to training young artists in the tradition of muralism. She is additionally co-founder and president of Tumis Inc., a bilingual design studio helping to integrate art with emerging technologies.

Rodriguez is co-editor of Reproduce and Revolt! with internationally renowned stencil artist and art critic Josh MacPhee (Soft Skull Press, 2008). Her artwork also appears in The Design of Dissent (Rockport Publishers, 2006), Peace Signs: The Anti-War Movement Illustrated (Edition Olms, 2004), and The Triumph of Our Communities: Four Decades of Mexican Art (Bilingual Review Press, 2005).