AC Institute

The AC Institute’s mission is to advance the understanding of the arts through investigation, research and education. It is a lab and forum for experimentation and critical discussion. We support and develop projects that explore a performative exchange across visual, sonic, verbal and experiential disciplines. We encourage critical writing that challenges conventional expectations of meaning and objectivity as well as the boundaries between the rational and subjective. The AC Institute is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization.

Holly Crawford, Ph.D., Director of AC Institute and AC Books, is a cross media artist, behavioral scientist, economist and art historian. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Essex in Art History and Theory, B.A and M.A. in Economics and M.S. in Behavioral Science from UCLA. From 2004-2006, Crawford was a non-clinical Fellow at NYU Medical School Psychoanalytic Center. She has taught at UCLA and SVA.

Crawford’s art and poetry give new meanings and draws categories themselves into question through transformative juxtapositions. She has exhibited in Florence, Valencia, Berlin, London, New York City and Southern California. Projects include Offerings (Ars Electronica, (.net Participant); Open Adoption, The Road, Hyphens, Voice Over, Found Punctuation (video) Tate Modern 2007; My I have your autograph? (unofficial, Basel Miami Art Fair 2007); Critical Conversations in a Limo, NY 2006 (VIP project, Armory), 2007 in Melbourne (Melbourne International Arts Festival) and San Francisco (The LAB & Sesnon Gallery UCSC); Sound Art Limo, NY and Melbourne 2007; and Flatland Limo, NYC 2008. Publications include Attached to the Mouse, 2006; catalogue essay, “Disney and Pop” in Once Upon a Time Walt Disney Studio; and Artistic Bedfellows, edited, 2008.  She is President of the American Friends of the University of Essex. art-poetry.info