AUS professors David Hewitt (Department of Art and Design) and Sajid Khan (Department of Marketing and Information Systems) will give a public talk at Cuadro Gallery, DIFC Dubai, on the roles of the various stakeholders involved in the production and/or co-creation of art experiences. The talk will explore stakeholders' roles, their interactions, intersections and points of difference, as well as the concerns marketing raises in relation to art production in the UAE.

The talk will give closure to a qualitative research study that resulted from an AUS Faculty Research Grant and will bring together many different topics on many different levels, all of which are presented as a coherent project--one that can be evaluated for merit and further pursuit by the audience. The talk will help engage the public in an open discussion of art and the local market. It will also include a slide show and talk about recent work. Audience input to the different phases of new creative work inspired by the research will help researchers evaluate the project for further pursuit.

The focus of the talk is the findings of the marketing study, the impact the research has had on David Hewitt's recent art production and the concerns marketing raises in relation to artists and their art.

Topics to be discussed:

• The process of visualizing the symbolic components inspired by direct response to academic research raise awareness of marketing in relation to artists and their art? 
• Ways artists in the UAE extend their influence beyond the making and exhibiting of the art object to social engagement and the building of artist networks. 
• The various stakeholders involved in the production and/or co-creation of art experiences--to explore their roles, explore their interactions, intersections and points of difference. 
• The symbiotic relationship that exists between scholarship (qualitative research) and creative activity.

About the authors

David Hewitt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Design at American University of Sharjah. He received his MFA from Cornell University. He has exhibited in North and South America with solo exhibitions at First Street Gallery, New York (2009) and Cuadro Gallery, Dubai (2010). Recent visual work is on exhibit in OPUS 6 at the Sharjah Art Foundation (2014). He writes and lectures on creative practice and on topics related to visual culture. His recent publication, Mark(et)ing scaffold(s), was presented at Contemporary Art '14, DAKAM, Eastern Mediterranean Academic Research Center, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey. He may be contacted at dhewitt@aus.edu.

Sajid Khan is an Associate Professor of Marketing at American University of Sharjah. He holds a PhD in consumer behavior from the University of Manchester, England. His current research interests lie in customer satisfaction, loyalty behavior and business-to-business service interactions. His recent work has been published in scholarly peer-reviewed journals such as Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Strategic Marketing and Journal of Marketing Management, among others. He may be contacted at mskhan@aus.edu.