Visual Arts Research is always seeking submissions of articles focused on visual arts and aesthetic education. The journal provides a forum for historical, critical, cultural, psychological, educational, and conceptual research. 

The most recent issue (Volume 49, Number 1) includes articles such as “Black on Black on Black on Black: An interview with Artist-Scholar Dr. Blair Ebony Smith” by Laura J. Hetrick and Dr. Blair Ebony Smith, “Pitfalls and Possibilities of Reciprocal Community Engagement: A Call to the Academy as a Platform for Activism” by Injeong Yoon-Ramirez, and “Collage as Epistemology: Construction—Deconstruction—Reconstruction” by Elizabeth R. Graham and David E. Gussak, and more—an example of a standard, non-themed issue (see below for information on how to submit to a standard issue). 

Edited by Sarah Travis and Laura Hetrick, Visual Arts Research is published biannually. Typically, one issue per year is a themed special issue with a guest editor. 

“Transformative Art Making and Caregiving with Young Children: Motherscholarship with The Scribble Squad” (Vol. 48, No. 2) 

Guest Editors: Marissa McClure, Christine Marmé Thompson, Georgina Badoni 

This special issue acknowledges the challenges faced by mothersholars—engaged parents and caregivers of any gender—in academia, particularly during the pandemic. The authors also focus on the positive experiences of quarantining with their families and engaging in collaborative research with their children. Each piece confronts childism through a shared ethics of resistance, highlighting possibilities for (re)connection between adults and children and between human and non-human actors. The essays also explore interdependence, vulnerability, and the spaces between adults and children where something new can be created. 

“Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing” (Vol. 48, No. 1) 

Guest Editors: Bert Stabler, Mira Rai Waits 

The summer 2022 issue showcases artists highlighting policing in their artwork, featuring posters from Josh MacPhee’s activist printmaking collective “Justseeds;” an interview with artist Marc Fisher on his collaborations with incarcerated people, his observation project based on court visits, and his publication recording police transmissions; and video compositions with reflections from scholar and activist Heath Schulz that touch on the segregated nature of policing. There is also scholarship on the aesthetics of the “invisible hand” in relation to policing, the fiction of safety in the prison industrial complex, and more.  

“Complex Textures: Visual Art, Play & Aesthetics of Black Girlhood” (Vol. 47, No. 1) 

Guest Editors: Ruth Nicole Brown, Blair Ebony Smith 

Focused on the experiences, art, and aesthetics of Black girls and women, this issue included multimedia texts (poetry, film, sound), art critiques, intimate theoretical explorations, analyses of art/performance, creative nonfiction, and experimental studies. Some of the topics discussed by contributors include interiority in documentary portraits of Black girls by Black women artists, the collective work of the Art Hoe Collective, complicating popular representations of Black girls lacking childhood, methodology to conversations with Black girls about sexuality through touch, and more.  

“Queering Art Education” (Vol. 46, No. 1) 

Guest Editor: Courtnie N. Wolfgang 

Even more important now than when originally published in 2020, this special issue focuses on the need for inclusive curriculum and positive representation of LGBTQ+ people in schools. Articles highlighted in this issue include a historical analysis of queer film festival posters a two-part conversational work about Blackness and queerness; queer dialogues on illness and disability; perspectives on what working in a queer affirming space does for a pedagogical, queer body; and more.  

“Women Art Educators in Higher Education: Conversations on Studio Practices”
(Vol. 45, No. 1) 

Guest Editor: Lillian Lewis  

For this issue, guest editor Lillian Lewis invited women navigating academic careers in art education while maintaining studio practice to engage in conversation with each other. These conversations include a combination of photographs and poetic questioning to consider the potential of social relations as practice, a description of collaborative efforts to revise review policies at a university, a piece compelling readers to consider art making as a story keeping process, a consideration of how intersectional identities can influence the academic and artistic processes, and more.