Dean’s Letter: Building a culture of artistic citizenship in our college
As our college thinks deeply about how we educate and support the next generation of artists, we have been exploring the framework of artistic citizenship, which gives us a way to talk about art and artmaking as key contributors to our social fabric and well-being.
The arts play an important role in our society, akin to the general protocols of civic participation. The arts sustain a public forum and stage opportunities for us to think about the biggest questions around our shared humanity and the challenges of our communities. At the same time, the arts are woven into the rituals and ceremonies that bring us together and serve as anchors to our major commitments to each other — from religion, marriage, major sports events and inaugurations to departure rituals around death and mourning.
We want to train our students to understand and engage with the best technical and scholarly training in the arts and with deep awareness of the economies they will navigate and impact along the way. We also want to help them understand and develop the skills to live lives of meaning that use their creative skills and employ their talents to do good in their communities. We want them to use their artistic practice to support how we relate to one another and to give experiences of joy and beauty, while also pondering and questioning things that move and try us as humans.
In this issue, we explore some concrete examples of how artistic citizenship is already happening in our college among our students, faculty and staff members.
Our new Arts Administration Fellows program helps undergraduate students gain valuable professional experience while supporting local arts organizations in paid internships at no cost to the local organizations.
The Butler School of Music’s Meet the Opera program exposes children across Austin to many aspects of opera through a partnership with Austin Public Libraries and Austin Opera.
Our recent Artistic Citizenship Arts Summit brought together scholars and leaders to think more deeply about how we continue to expand this framework in our college and beyond.
Even our staff members are a significant part of this effort as they support our educational and research mission in the college, while they pursue their own artistic practices and serve as incredible arts advocates.
And these are just a few examples — I invite you to explore the full issue to learn about more ways that our faculty, students and staff are working to enrich their communities locally, nationally and globally through their creative practices, scholarship and pedagogy.
The artistic citizenship framework enables us to expand our artistic practices into the public sphere in meaningful ways. By emphasizing the responsibilities of social engagement in and through arts, it reflects both the college’s mission and the broader goals of higher education at The University of Texas at Austin. It provides a unifying framework that connects education, practice and community engagement, while reinforcing our commitment to the University and the wider public we serve.
Sincerely,
Ramón H. Rivera-Servera
Dean, College of Fine Arts