Three UO art professors and a recent UO MFA graduate are joining artists from around the country May 28-30 in the Third Culture Conversations at the Lewis Integrative Science Building (LISB) on the UO campus. The gathering is part conference and part creative/intellectual experiment among nineteen artists and UO scientists, sponsored by the Oregon Arts Commission.

Department of Art professors Carla Bengston, Mike Bray, and Euan Macdonald, along with Sarah Nance, MFA ’13, are taking part in the gathering. Following the event, each of the artists is invited to propose a project that involves collaborators from the LISB community, three of which will be funded and completed by June 2015.

“Third Culture” references the arguments of British scientist and writer C.P. Snow, who, in a series of lectures, articles and books between 1959 and 1963, encouraged more collaboration between the sciences and humanities. Integrative science is the practice of gathering all the expertise in basic and applied sciences as well as expertise in any other relevant field (public policy, law, business, communications, design, art, anthropology, sociology, etc.) to simultaneously address a particular problem from multiple perspectives.