Love’s testimony: Critical arts-based inquiry as a third space and pedagogical concern

• In Event: Composing otherwise: Black Studies and the future of arts-based education research

Abstract

This arts-based research study explores how artistic expression can function as a third space for radical care within Black American communities. Framed through Black feminist and liberatory traditions in art education (Acuff, 2018), the project asks: How might the arts be used to create and sustain spaces of love and liberation, particularly in contexts historically marked by trauma, faith, and ambivalence around intimacy and care?
The research draws on Rolling’s (2013) critical-activist and synthetic inquiry frameworks within arts-based methodology, situating artistic practice as both a mode of knowledge production and a vehicle for cultural critique. Theoretically, the study is grounded in bell hooks’ writings on love as a political and liberatory force (hooks, 2000; 2001), alongside Tina Campt’s (2023) articulation of the Black gaze as an embodied, affective, and resistant orientation. Through this lens, the arts are positioned not simply as expressive tools, but as modalities of survival, reorientation, and collective healing.

The study employs a multi-method, multisensory approach. Methods include performance-based inquiry and autoethnographic reflection. These methodologies are designed to activate the body and senses as sites of knowledge, creating immersive environments where participants can engage intimately with their own and others’ experiences of love. The centerpiece of the study—Love’s Testimony, a one-day pop-up art installation—transformed an institutional setting into a communal site of radical care. Through visual, sonic, and dialogic prompts, participants were invited to engage in sustained conversations around the meanings and tensions of love in their lives.
Findings from the pilot event indicate that centering love in institutional spaces not designed to hold it constitutes a radical and transformative act. Participants identified the space as one of affirmation, reflection, and belonging, with many extending the conversations beyond the formal event itself. This suggests that even brief, art-centered interventions can catalyze durable forms of communal meaning-making. As the artist-researcher notes, “to center love in a space that is not built to hold it... that is revolutionary” (see also hooks, 2001; Campt, 2023).

The scholarly significance of this work lies in its demonstration of how arts-based education research can be mobilized to investigate foundational human experiences—namely, love—as pedagogical and methodological concerns. The study contributes to emerging scholarship on love-centered pedagogies, healing justice, and the liberatory role of arts programming in educational and community contexts. It addresses a critical gap in art education scholarship by explicitly centering Black cultural knowledge, faith traditions, and care practices as valid and vital sites of inquiry. In doing so, the project offers new models for how art educators and researchers might reimagine the role of aesthetic practice in cultivating spaces of collective healing, survival, and joy.

Author

• Iyana Shanel Hill, The Ohio State University