Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting
The Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting (CAIR) is a first-of-its-kind initiative that generates meaningful collaboration between journalists and artists in order to ensure powerful public interest stories have more impact and greater emotional resonance. Together with Jake Charles Rees, I co-founded the organization.
CAIR works in a variety of different ways:
EDUCATION: We teach art students seeking to produce work that reaches out from beyond museums and galleries the tools and tactics of an investigative practice, as well as help to familiarize themselves with the language and codes of the journalism field.
PUBLICATION SUPPORT: As journalism continues its radical metamorphosis, we connect legacy and digital newsrooms to artists with distinctive viewpoints on world events and urgent social issues to help foster the creation of more imaginative storytelling. Artists with confirmed collaborations with news organizations can also apply for production support for their work. In addition to fiscal resources, they will also receive guidance on process and deliverables from the AIR team.
INSTITUTIONS: Museums are on the forefront of environmental, political and social justice issues and yet outside of their in-person attendance, most of their ideas stay within the milieu of the art-going population. We work with major art, cultural and non-profit institutions to incorporate their programming into mainstream news to reach as wide an audience as possible.
For more information on how your organization can work with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting, please contact info@artisticinquiry.org.
Is There a Future for Russian Independent Media
This was the first piece CAIR put together. It came out of our RISD course Artists Report from 2022. The artist Alina Spatz created the visuals for this work and then teamed up with The Nation to produce this incredible investigation.
Investigating Climate Change
In January we started a new project “Investigating Climate Change” with the Centre for Investigative Journalism, Investigate Europe and Supra Systems Studio based at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Over a semester we will be working with students from several departments to help them develop their own artistic investigations into climate change.
We have also curated a cohort of lecturers to teach alongside us, such as investigative journalist and host of the true crime climate podcast “Drilled,” Amy Westervelt, reporters, producers and visual investigators Sanjana Varghese and Julia Neuno from Airwars, investigative reporter and author Crofton Black, as well as the writer, designer and investigator Ingrid Burrington.
At the end of the project the students will display their works in a series of exhibitions. Stay tuned for more details!