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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Winter 2006 : Bending, Blending, Upending

Bending, blending, upending: New directions in arts education

Taking the arts to a new level

When I arrived as dean in 1996, art was being taught in a derelict West Bank shack more suited to munching (of the rodent variety) than education and creative work. Across the river, dance students were bruising their shins on the unforgiving floors of the Norris Hall gym.

We dreamed of new facilities and bold new artistic collaborations. And we began making plans for an "arts quarter"—a revitalized center for arts education that would propel our programs in art, music, theatre, and dance into the national spotlight.

With the generous support of donors, friends, and community partners, we created new spaces—first the Barbara Barker Center for Dance and later, the Regis Center for Art. We began transforming the curriculum. We hired spectacular new faculty who were breaking the mold and working in new art forms. We made it happen.

In my message for the summer 1999 issue of CLA Today, I said, "Some of the finest creative work in the state is happening right here on the West Bank—students and faculty teaching and learning their craft, making and talking about art, and bringing ideas, stories, musical compositions, texts, and visions to life on stage, in studios and galleries, and in the lives of audiences." The Arts Quarter, I declared, with its "open commerce" in ideas and artistic expression, would position CLA internationally at the headwaters of the arts.

Today, the West Bank Arts Quarter is that vital center of teaching, performance, scholarship, and creativity that we dreamed about. It is helping to reshape the American university arts curriculum and experience. It is attracting dazzling student and faculty talent from across the nation and around the world, and the newcomers are working side by side with their senior colleagues and classmates across departments and programs to generate fresh approaches to creative expression.

In his guest column in this issue, President Bruininks says, "A thriving artistic community is key to the University's relevance and its reputation for excellence." These are not empty words. Bruininks' Interdisciplinary Initiative on the Arts and Humanities has helped take us to the next level of excellence and creativity.

Collaborating on the edge

As always, our faculty and students remain committed to revisiting the great artistic traditions to develop fresh interpretations and understandings of classic works and traditional art forms. They still paint real and imagined landscapes, throw pots, create fresh interpretations of Bach Cello Suites and Mozart trios, perform Verdi and Donizetti operas, and mount inventive productions of plays by Moliere and Shakespeare.

But it doesn't stop there.

They are also striking out in new directions, taking us where arts education has rarely gone before. They are bending and blending genres and media and experimenting with new technologies. They are engaging multiple theoretical and aesthetic perspectives and pushing and blurring the boundaries of artistic expression and understanding at the edges and intersections of disciplines.

At the heart of this creative enterprise is collaboration, both within and beyond the arts quarter. That is the source of its special genius.

When creative collaborations emerge—often sparked by an impromptu conversation or serendipitous meeting of minds in close proximity—we often don't know where they will take us, but that's part of the excitement. It's a little like "alternative" music: unorthodox, unpredictable, elastic, surprising. It's not that there are no rules. But we don't necessarily know what the rules are, or what the new art forms are going to be. It's a perpetual process of discovery.

The arts in America and the world

The arts have taken a beating nationwide as American culture has become more and more narrowly pragmatic and instrumentalist in its orientation to the world. Forty-four states, including Minnesota, have made radical reductions in their arts appropriations in recent years. In public K-12 schools, the arts are often the first casualty of economic uncertainty coupled with a failure of imagination.

In my view, it is shortsighted to shortchange the arts. In the kind of world I want to live in, academic disciplines are valued for their contributions not only to the economy and to productivity but also to our understanding of the human spirit and to the cultural and social health of our communities.

One lesson we learned during the Cold War is that even if our nations' governments don't get along, our people can; and our artists can be catalysts for understanding and rapprochement. Indeed, artists were agents of glasnost long before the word entered the American vernacular. While national leaders were shouting at each other across continents and conference tables and were threatening to bury each other, exchange programs and commerce in the arts were securing understanding and friendship that transcended ideology. And that's still happening.

Economic and cultural payoff

To be sure, the arts fuel the economy, both directly and indirectly: In Minnesota, the arts all told pump well over $1 billion into the economy through everything from ticket sales to sales of art materials, gallery rentals, and vendor contracts for printing and production.

As I write this, thousands of people are pouring into Twin Cities theaters, galleries, and concert halls—spending their money not just at these arts venues but also in restaurants and retail establishments. Even the cost of clothes, travel, and parking for an arts event can be calculated into the subtle but significant economic payoff that Ann Markusen and David King of the University's Humphrey Institute call the "arts dividend."

More important, though, the arts make our lives better, whether we create art or (for those of us lacking the art gene) simply participate vicariously in acts of creation from the best seats in the house we can grab. The arts challenge us, nourish us, soothe us, and move us to action. They bring us together, and they teach us about ourselves and the world. They yank us out of our ruts and routines and take us down new paths. They take us out of our own time and across cultural and national borders into new worlds. They give us the universal language for communicating across those borders.

Look at any society, and you'll find the creative impulse hard at work, giving us everything from symphonies to skyscrapers, from transportation systems to systems of laws, from technology innovations to inventive solutions to everyday problems.

The neuroscientist tracing patterns of brain activity and the social scientist interpreting patterns of human behavior; the teacher developing new instructional strategies; the architect creating a blueprint for a new building; the entrepreneur growing a business; the engineer inventing new technologies; the novelist fleshing out characters; and the lawyer presenting her case in a courtroom—every one of these people is performing a creative act.

Fortunately, the University's commitment to the arts on campus is helping to balance the arts-science-technology equation. The University and the College of Liberal Arts are leading exploration on the frontiers of creative and innovative thinking in the arts. That leadership not only fuels our state's and our nation's cultural vitality but also drives innovation and achievement in science and across all sectors of society.

Preserving the vitality of the arts is critical to the development of human creativity and a civil society. The arts not only make our lives better—they make us better.

I invite you to visit the West Bank Arts Quarter and experience the transformation for yourself.

Steven J. Rosenstone
CLA Dean and McKnight Presidential Leadership Chair