Graeme Sullivan is Director of the School of Visual Arts, Pennsylvania State University and Professor of Art Education. He is the former Chair of the Department of Arts and Humanities, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. He received his PhD and MA from The Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio. Graeme trained as a high school art teacher, graduating from Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education, Sydney in 1974. He is a former teacher and art consultant with the NSW Department of Education and taught as the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney, from 1988, before taking up a position at Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1999.
Since the early 1990s Graeme’s research has investigated the critical–reflexive thinking and forming processes in visual arts and studio–based research practices. These ideas are described in his groundbreaking 2005 book, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts, with a revised and expanded edition published in 2010. Graeme has authored numerous book chapters and articles on practice–based research published in the USA, UK, Europe, Asia and Australasia. He has received several awards, including the 2007 Lowenfeld Award from the National Art Education Association (USA) for significant contribution to the field of art education, and the 1990 Manual Barkan Memorial Award for scholarly writing. Graeme is also the author of Seeing Australia: Views of Artists and Artwriters (1994). He has taken on many professional roles and is the former Senior Editor of Studies in Art Education, and editor of Australian Art Education. He is currently Associate Commissioner of the NAEA Research Commission.
Graeme maintains an active art practice and his Streetworks have been installed in several international cities over the past twenty years. He uses materials retrieved from the streets to create artworks that are exhibited and later installed at local sites. Graeme explains, “I’m not sure what happens to most of my Streetworks. But even if the life of the artwork is short, or the encounter brief, one never really knows the outcome, nor where the experience of art happens. I like that.” Graeme’s most recent streetwork project was participating in an exhibition, Art is Me, Art is You, held at the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles. This group exhibition celebrated community engagement on the anniversary of the LA (Rodney King) riots of 1992 and included a public art walk performance where the artists ‘wore’ their artwork as a gesture to emphasize that the creative impulse originates within an individual yet its significance needs to be seen and felt within the community. His piece was later installed in a vacant allotment in southside Los Angeles.
