The arts and nursing are profoundly connected. While the relationship between nursing and art has persisted over time, the majority of nursing scholarship on the arts has historically centered upon the art of nursing practice and the cultivation and application of aesthetic knowing. However, there is a burgeoning use of arts-based strategies is nursing education, research, and practice. Correspondingly, there is a need to understand how such approaches can uniquely contribute knowledge to the nursing discipline in order to support arts-integration for nursing scholars. We structure our inquiry into arts' contributions according to two dominant methods of engaging with arts-based strategies: knowing about (e.g., phenomena) vis-à-vis art-viewing, and knowing through (e.g., embodied knowing) vis-à-vis art-making. In doing so, we explore critical contributions of art to nursing research and educational practices, including arts' capacity to augment traditional research and communication approaches, democratize the research space, challenge issues of representation, and facilitate education, dissemination, and reflexivity.
Keywords: art; arts-based methods; arts-based research; epistemology; knowing; nursing knowledge.
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.