Lee Boot is an artist and researcher living and working in Greater Baltimore. His main artmaking practices are painting and filmmaking—often combined—and he is Director of the Imaging Research Center at UMBC.
Despite a early career successes as a media artisit, he stepped away from the artworld per se in the late 1990s to focus on bringing artistic thought into areas of public policy, such as health and education. Now, encouraged by the increasing social engagement of the artworld—a dramatic change from the artworld he’d rejected—and deeply involved once again in painting (something he has never stopped doing as a key part of his work), he is seeking ways to integrate the art and public policy worlds that go beyond criticism and empathy building, as important as those are. Instead, he believes that the ways artists think: framing issues within human, cultural contexts; embracing ambiguity and complexity, using metaphor and analogy; seeing improbable or hidden connections and patterns; use of a honed intuition; and aesthetic inquiry must be introduced into otherwise technocratic and failing approaches to meeting the “wicked” challenges of our time.
Painting both embodies these modes of thought and stands as culturally-embedded symbol of them. Many of the paintings on the site were filmed in their making to reveal their gestation.
Despite a early career successes as a media artisit, he stepped away from the artworld per se in the late 1990s to focus on bringing artistic thought into areas of public policy, such as health and education. Now, encouraged by the increasing social engagement of the artworld—a dramatic change from the artworld he’d rejected—and deeply involved once again in painting (something he has never stopped doing as a key part of his work), he is seeking ways to integrate the art and public policy worlds that go beyond criticism and empathy building, as important as those are. Instead, he believes that the ways artists think: framing issues within human, cultural contexts; embracing ambiguity and complexity, using metaphor and analogy; seeing improbable or hidden connections and patterns; use of a honed intuition; and aesthetic inquiry must be introduced into otherwise technocratic and failing approaches to meeting the “wicked” challenges of our time.
Painting both embodies these modes of thought and stands as culturally-embedded symbol of them. Many of the paintings on the site were filmed in their making to reveal their gestation.
