Provost IMPACT Award: Expanding UK’s art ecosystem

LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 16, 2025) — Last fall, the University of Kentucky Office of the Provost announced the second cohort of the Institutional Multidisciplinary Paradigm to Accelerate Collaboration and Transformation (IMPACT) Awards winners.  

The IMPACT Awards initiative, an internal funding program from the Office of the Provost, launched in 2023 to support innovation and transformation within UK’s colleges. The awards recognize the groundbreaking work conducted by faculty and staff across campus, and they create opportunities for transdisciplinary collaboration to occur between UK community members to help the university’s mission of advancing Kentucky. 

Fifteen colleges, including UK Libraries and the Graduate School, are working collectively to break new ground on ways to advance the Commonwealth. 

This spring, UKNow is highlighting the 2024-25 IMPACT Award projects and the faculty members who are leading them. Today, we learn more about the project titled “Expanding the University of Kentucky Arts Ecosystem.” 

This project proposes to transform the gallery in the University of Kentucky’s new Gray Design Building into a dynamic hub for art and design, expanding the university’s arts ecosystem through a partnership between the College of Design, College of Fine Arts, UK HealthCare and the UK Office for Student Success. The initiative includes physical upgrades to the gallery, the appointment of a curator and the launch of a student docent program. It also introduces a self-guided campus “art walk” linking multiple exhibition spaces. By fostering collaboration, showcasing innovative exhibitions and enhancing student engagement, the project aims to position UK as a regional leader in creative research, arts education and cultural innovation. 

The team includes Lindsey Fay, associate dean for research; Liz Swanson, associate dean for student affairs and Ned Crankshaw, dean, of the UK College of Design; Mark Shanda, dean of the College of Fine Arts; Jason Akhtarekhavari, Arts in HealthCare Manager at UK HealthCare; Kirsten Turner, vice president for Student Success; Trisha Clement-Montgomery, dean of students, and Molly Reynolds, associate vice president for student excellence, in the Office for Student Success. 

UKNow talked with Dean of the College of Design Ned Crankshaw to learn more about the project. You can read more in the Q&A session below. 

How has the IMPACT award inspired innovation at UK with your research? 

Prior to us receiving the IMPACT award, the gallery space was merely an empty room. This award has allowed us to install the infrastructure like lighting, a projector and various audiovisual elements that transformed the space into a functioning gallery. Now that the space has this capability, we have been able to host several first-of-their-kind exhibitions and events such as New York-based nonprofit The World Around’s debut exhibition; the inaugural prototype workshop for the Department of Transformation initiative, a multidisciplinary project aimed at connecting art, design and architecture programs across public universities in the United States and a student-organized interdisciplinary Gaines thesis showcase.  

This IMPACT Award has provided a crucial platform for us to reimagine how a university gallery can function not just as a display space, but as an incubator for creative research, collaboration and community engagement. It’s allowed us to bring together partners from across campus and beyond to co-create a vibrant, inclusive hub for the arts. This level of transdisciplinary innovation wouldn’t be possible without the support of the IMPACT initiative, which has helped us move from idea to action in developing a gallery space that’s both pedagogically rich and publicly accessible. 

How did you decide on this particular topic or research area? 

This project emerged from a desire to connect the creative disciplines more deeply with the broader university and Lexington community. That led us to focus on the gallery as a living laboratory for creative research and as a tool for cultivating public dialogue through art and design. One way we aim to do this is through establishing the gallery as a hub for design scholarship, exhibiting the work of renowned artists and designers from around the world, accompanied by symposia, educational programs, special events and scholarly publications that foster collaborations with peer and benchmark institutions as well as encourage our own faculty to introduce their research and work to a public audience.   

Another one of the driving factors behind this project was the value it could bring to not only our design students, but also to students across campus. By showcasing engaging and challenging work, any student who interacts with the gallery’s programming will experience art and design in a direct and tangible way, allowing them to further deepen their critical thinking skills, self-awareness and cultural perspective as it relates to the creative disciplines. Through curated exhibitions, discussions and workshops, we hope students will gain insight into society’s most pressing issues and the many ways artists and designers contribute to this critical discourse. We hope this gallery will inspire any student interested in art and design to explore what is possible when their own creativity and critical thinking skills meet the capabilities of a display space like this.  

What positive impact will your research have on Kentucky and beyond? 

Our vision is to make the University of Kentucky a cultural anchor for the region. By investing in this gallery and connecting it to existing arts programming across campus, we’re making the arts more accessible to students, faculty and the broader Lexington community. By developing a student docent program in conjunction with the gallery, this program will create opportunities for leadership and professional development for our students, furthering their capacity and confidence within the workplace. As student leaders, those employed in the docent program will work closely with curators, faculty and specific staff in the Stuckert Career Center to cultivate essential soft skills that will advance their professionalism and future employability. For Kentucky, this means creating a stronger pipeline of creative professionals, supporting workforce development in the arts and reinforcing the value of design thinking in public life.  

Beyond Kentucky, we envision this as a scalable model for embedding arts-based research in university life, so we hope it inspires other universities to see the value that investing in arts and design can bring to a campus. We aim to model how universities across the nation can use art spaces to advance transdisciplinary research, community engagement and student development. 

What comes next for your research? 

At this stage, we are focusing on refining our processes for hosting exhibits and collaborating with curators and artists to ensure a strong foundation for future initiatives. We’re working on deepening partnerships across campus and beyond to expand programming, research collaborations and student opportunities. We’re exploring ways to bring in visiting artists and designers whose work challenges conventions and inspires critical dialogue. We’re also looking at how the gallery can support faculty research across disciplines, not just in design, and serve as a catalyst for externally funded creative projects. 

While students have been actively involved in organizing and installing exhibitions thus far, we have not yet formally established a docent program. So, soon, we hope to launch this program to recruit and train student docents who will lead tours, engage with visitors and act as ambassadors for the gallery, enriching the visitor experience while gaining valuable professional skills. A bit further down the road we also plan to begin developing a self-guided “art walk” that will aim to encourage students to explore the wealth of UK’s art offerings.  

One of the upcoming things that we are excited about is an exhibit in partnership with the Gaines Center for Humanities. We have arranged for some art to be displayed in conjunction with their Bale Boone Symposium in the fall. Stay tuned into Gaines Center socials for details on that. Oh, and be sure to follow along on College of Design socials to learn about the rest of our exciting fall programming for the gallery.