What is the nature of art/science collaborations in museums? How do art objects and activities contribute to the successes of science centers? Based on the premise that art exhibitions and art-based activities engage museum visitors in different ways than do strictly factual, information-based displays, I address these questions in a case study that examines the roles of visual art and artists in the Exploratorium, a museum that has influenced exhibit design and professional practice in many of the hands-on science centers in the United States and around the world. The marriage of art and science in education is not a new idea - Leonardo da Vinci and other early polymaths surely understood how their various endeavors informed one another, and some 20th century educators understood the value of the arts and creativity in the learning and practice of other disciplines. When, in 2010, the National Science Teachers Association added an A to the federal government's ubiquitous STEM initiative and turned it into STEAM, art educators nationwide took notice. With a heightened interest in the integration of and collaboration between disciplines comes an increased need for models of best practice for educators and educational institutions. With the intention to understand the nature of such collaborations and the potential they hold, I undertook this study. I made three site visits to the Exploratorium, where I took photos, recorded notes in a journal, interacted with exhibits, and observed museum visitors. I collected other data by examining the institution's website, press releases, annual reports, and fact sheets; and by reading popular and scholarly articles written by museum staff members and by independent journalists. I quickly realized that the Exploratorium was not created in the way than most museums are, and the history of its founding and the ideals of its founder illuminate what was then and continues now to be different about this museum from most others in the United States. This dissertation presents an account of the history of the institution and the continuing legacy of the early Exploratorium and its founder, Frank Oppenheimer. I argue that the institution is an early example of a constructivist learning museum. I then describe how art encourages learning in the museum. It provides means of presenting information that engage all of the senses and encourage emotional involvement. It reframes familiar sights so that viewers look more closely in search of recognition, and it presents intangible or dematerialized things in a tangible way. It facilitates play, with its many benefits. It brings fresh perspectives and processes to problem solving and the acquisition of new knowledge. This project is the study of an institution where art and science have always coexisted with equal importance, setting it apart from more traditional museums where art was added as a secondary focus to the original disciplinary concentration of the institution. Many of the exhibits were created by artists, but the real value the visual arts bring to the museum is in its contributions to processes such as inquiry, play, problem-solving, and innovation.

The basic, universal movement of the running body has been repeated and made visible in aesthetic, scientific, and political debates. Such debates of the body may depend on live movements in real space-time, movements articulated by motion capture devices, or movements that exercise in imagination: a head of state who uses the running body to manipulate his political subject, for example, or a series of images taken from an optical motion capture system that simultaneously represents and dissects movement patterns of the body in its swiftest motions, or a sound art installation that voices the familiar dynamics of running steps and heavy breathing. In each instance, the bodily practice of running is extracted from its seemingly unmediated everyday, placed instead within aesthetic methodologies and technologies to scrutinize the movement and its complex of meanings. This action is meant to reveal that real experience-that nonfictional movement, as it were-of the body running, to see into the rhetorical, cultural productions of our public, bodily realities. I begin this inquiry by defining the term "running body" and examining the manner in which that body was scientifically observed and aesthetically codified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then, the running body is investigated in experimental choreography, visual arts, and political demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s. Thirdly, I will address the use of the actual running body within contemporary art exhibitions, as either an intervention or interruption to accustomed meaning-making within traditional spaces for art. At the dissertation's end will be an exploration of the running body as a critical method for reorienting the narrative of contemporary history with image technologies, art installation devices, and the moving body. This study demonstrates that if, at the very base of our existence, our bodies move the world and, in turn, the world around us moves our body, this same reciprocity can hold true in shaping historical consciousness and self-consciousness.

The art and art history of the American West has long been uncritically accepted as embodying positive nationalistic values that include courage, optimism, democracy, and individualism. In 1991, William Truettner's The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920 (1991) became one of the most politically charged western art exhibitions in American history to question and criticize these values and to underscore the ideological content of western art. The exhibition with its accompanying catalogue reinterpreted nineteenth-century images of the American West as expansionist propaganda. In spite of this groundbreaking and controversial exhibition and catalogue, exhibitions continue to promote largely romanticized and idyllic images of pristine landscapes with American Indians living in a harmonious world. The scholarly essay and museum exhibition entitled Lone Wolf (Hart M. Schultz): Cowboy, Actor and Artist, focuses on the artwork and life of Blackfeet artist Lone Wolf, (aka Hart Merriam Schultz, 1882-1970), who was active from 1915 to 1960, painting in Montana at Glacier National Park in the summertime, and wintering in Tucson, Arizona. As a little known and understudied American Indian artist, this exhibition and essay serve to expand awareness of the significant contributions by marginalized artists who successfully negotiated the terrain of the mainstream art world. Lone Wolf exemplifies a unique case study as an artist with American Indian heritage, who actively participated in the creation of stereotypical and romantic images about the American West, while he maintained that his first-hand experience and indigenous knowledge helped him to accurately depict what was considered the authentic American West. The exhibition and essay adds to the growing scholarly interest in the art of the American West and incorporates contemporary theories and scholarship that recognizes the American West and the art devoted to it as distinctly heterogeneous and embedded in a number of discourses that are overshadowed by the lingering romanticism and nostalgia that clings to much art of the American West.

Internet Memes transverse and sometimes transcend cyberspace on the back of impossibly cute LOLcats speaking mangled English and the snarky remarks of Image Macro characters always on the lookout for someone to undermine. No longer the abstract notion of a cultural gene that Dawkins (2006) introduced in the late 1970s, memes have now become synonymous with a particular brand of vernacular language that internet users engage by posting, sharing and remixing digital content as they communicate jokes, emotions and opinions. For the purpose of this research the language of Internet Memes is understood as visual, succinct and capable of inviting active engagement by users who encounter digital content online that exhibits said characteristics. Internet Memes were explored through an Arts-Based Educational Research framework by first identifying the conventions that shape them and then interrogating these conventions during two distinct research phases. In the first phase the researcher, as a doctoral student in art and visual culture education, engaged class readings and assignments by generating digital content that not only responded to the academic topics at hand but did so through forms associated with Internet Memes like Image Macros and Animated GIFs. In the second phase the researcher became a meme literacy facilitator as learners in three different age-groups were led in the reading, writing and remixing of memes during a month-long summer art camp where they were also exposed to other art-making processes such as illustration, acting and sculpture. Each group of learners engaged age-appropriate meme types: 1) the youngest group, 6 and 7 year-olds, wrote Emoji Stories and Separated at Birth memes; 2) the middle group, 8-10 year-olds, worked with Image Macros and Perception memes, 3) while the oldest group, 11-13 year-olds, generated Image Macros and Animated GIFs. The digital content emerging from both research phases was collected as data and analyzed through a hybrid of Memetics, Actor-Network Theory, Object Oriented Ontology, Remix Theory and Glitch Studies as the researcher shifted shapes yet again and became a Research Jockey sampling freely from each field of study. A case is made for Internet Memes to be understood as an actor-network where meme collectives, individual cybernauts, software and source material are all actants interrelating and making each other enact collective agencies through shared authorships. Additionally specific educational contexts are identified where the language of Internet Memes can serve to incorporate technology, storytelling, visual thinking and remix practices into art and visual culture education. Finally, the document reporting on the research expands on the hermeneutics of Internet Memes and the phenomenological experiences they elicit that are otherwise absent from traditional scholarly prose. Chapter by chapter the dissertation was crafted as a journey from the academic to the whimsical, from the lecture hall to the image board (where Internet Memes were born), from the written word to the remixed image as a visual language that is equal parts form and content that emerges and culminates in a concluding chapter composed almost entirely of popular Internet Meme types. An online component can be found at http://memeducation.org/