The Center for Art as Lived Experience is a multidisciplinary visual arts research center that promotes innovative ideas on the integration of the arts in communities and pedagogy by emphasizing the intersections of art and lived experience.

Art as lived experience: All forms of artistic inquiry are influenced by lived experience. Indeed, the visual arts are critical to understanding the complexities of daily life, our lived relations to the social world, and the plurality of images and visual languages that come to define it. 

The Center for Art as Lived Experience creates a space for cross-collaboration between all four academic areas of the School of Art — art education, art history, graphic design and studio art — with emphasis on how art relates to collective and individual lived experiences and the role of art within our society. The center promotes interdisciplinary approaches to art-making, locating where art and life intersect, and how to integrate art into communities. These three principles open an avenue for external collaboration on campus with other departments and the Northwest Arkansas community. By working directly with visual artists and scholars within the field of art, the core focus of the center’s research looks at how art can make meaningful contributions to collective societal issues related to technology, economics, healthcare, social justice, and sustainability, to name a few.