Art Meets AI: Transforming Undergraduate Education Through Community-Based Teaching and Learning
This story was written by Francesco Fedele, associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and 2025-2026 Transformative Teaching and Learning Innovation Incubator grantee.
Francesco Fedele
Imagine a future where the boundaries between technology and art dissolve, opening a shared space for experimentation, collaboration, and mutual learning. At Georgia Tech, I have created exactly this kind of holistic space by launching a collaborative, community-based learning initiative with support from the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Office of Community-Based Learning. Thanks to their Transformative Teaching and Learning program and Innovation Incubator grant, I brought together Georgia Tech and three of Atlanta’s most vibrant art organizations: Fly on a Wall, The Pollinator Art Space, and the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center. Through this partnership, I built a living classroom where students work directly with practicing artists, integrating AI with artistic practice to explore what it means to create, perform, and express in the age of intelligent machines.
At the heart of the initiative is the new CEE4803 Art and Generative AI course, where community artists support and co-teach with me. Together, we guide students through foundational art practices and collaborative, community-centered work. This model of co-teaching offers a powerful way to integrate the arts into STEM. Artists teach freely, almost by osmosis. Engineers teach through structure, rules, and methods. When these approaches meet, the synergy is transformative, creating a holistic learning experience that expands how students think, create, and imagine.
Artist Sabre Esler teaches oil painting.
A student uses a viewfinder.
Artist Rachel Grant teaches plein air painting.
The Art and Generative AI course combines weekly lectures, where I teach students the fundamentals of AI, with fifteen hands-on art lab studios led by community artists. These labs span core artistic practices, including drawing, painting, collage, music, movement, and AI-generated creativity. In Fall 2025, artist Sabre Esler, founder of the Pollinator Art Space, led sessions on fundamental drawing and oil painting. Sabre’s work explores the dynamics between natural and man-made systems, using layers of lyrical brushstrokes and intricate geometries with shifting perspectives. Artist Adam Faust and Operations Director of the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center taught students how to create collages for visual storytelling through paper materials. Artist Rachel Grant guided students in learning how to truly see through plein air painting. Students practiced observing the essential elements of a realistic landscape and capturing them on canvas. Painting, as she emphasizes, is the art of seeing. Rachel is a visual artist, with a background that bridges art, psychology, and arts administration. Finally, Jimmy Joyner and
Joyner and Johnson introduce students to dance at Fly on a Wall.
Nicole Johnson from Fly on a Wall led a dance session at their studio. They introduced students to movement and embodiment as forms of artistic inquiry. Fly on a Wall is an Atlanta-based arts platform dedicated to embodied performance. Through trust-building, playful exploration, and creative work with fabric, students experienced how movement can expand perception and open new forms of expression.
The final art exhibition, AnthropogenIc, showcased the AI artwork created by students. In the exhibition, students explored a largely dismissed frontier of human–machine creativity: one grounded not in the dominance of AI, but in its vulnerability. Every artwork emerged from data generated by the students themselves and from AI algorithms written entirely from scratch. Here, students retain full authorship and agency. They design, train, and shape the systems that become their collaborators. Within this tension, AnthropogenIc unfolds as a human act: generating and reshaping what the algorithm cannot resolve. Students step in as co-creators, transforming AI hallucinations into meaning, and code into gesture.
Artist Rachel Grant teaches plein air painting.
At its core, this community-based learning framework transforms how students learn and experience artificial intelligence and art. Students gain the ability to explain the fundamentals of artificial intelligence in their own words, building a clear and accessible understanding of its core principles. At the same time, they explore the arts through AI, learning art fundamentals by working directly with artists from Atlanta’s art communities.
AI assistance was used to revise grammar and form. Visit Spotify to hear an AI-voiced transcript of an original version of this article as part of Fedele’s The Curious Mind: Exploring Science, Art, & AI podcast.
