As we kick off a new fall semester, I’m especially excited to launch our college’s strategic plan during the coming weeks. We’ve spent the past year and half gathering input and drafting, sharing and refining our road map for the college’s next five years. We are building upon the strengths in our college and imagining an ambitious vision for our future.
In this issue, we explore a few stories that show some of the excellent work already happening that aligns around our strategic plan pillars: Research, Education, Community Engagement and Organizational Culture. (You can get a preview of our strategic plan aspirations on page 13.)
For example, in an interview with Professor of Music Theory Eric Drott, you’ll meet a scholar who works within his discipline of music theory, while using his research tools to explore the use of technology in public life — specifically, how technology has affected the business of music-making and distribution. In an interview about his new book Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press, 2024), he showcases the ways in which research both documents and shapes the future of our practices in the arts.
In a different feature story, we explore examples of innovation in our classrooms and studios. These exciting vignettes show how our faculty members are ushering in this new future in the classroom with new techniques, new technologies, new exercises and animations of our learning spaces. For example, you’ll read about how students in Arts and Entertainment Technologies programmed the first student-created drone show on campus, and you’ll also read about how stellar Art History professors teamed up to co-teach a course on Water Histories using archives and artifacts to explore how water shows up in cultural expression, from ancient times to the modern era. These stories show the range of themes and times that our students explore today.
You’ll also read about a public art project by Professors Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler that highlights excellence in community engagement. For their most recent project Past Deposits of a Future Yet to Come, Hubbard/Birchler used archives and collections of local history and amplified them through large-scale projection work at Waterloo Park to contemplate who we are as a community. They meticulously photographed hundreds of objects uncovered in the city blocks and creek that now make up Waterloo Greenway and turned them into a gorgeous video work that plays with scale to explore these human-made objects that accumulated in our environment and waterways.
In another example of community engaged work, we highlight artist duo Las Nietas de Nonó, who served as the artists-in-residence at the Visual Arts Center during this past spring. While the Hubbard/Birchler piece turns to human-made objects, Las Nietas focus on organic matter, using SCOBYs, the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast used to make kombucha, to create shapes and objects in the galleries that speak to the communities they grew up in as Puerto Ricans. Both artist duos pursue quotidian materials and build environments that speak about our history and collective futures.
The Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, my own research platform, seeks to connect art-making with community engagement, and I’m proud to share that the Mellon Foundation just renewed its generous support to continue bringing forth this important work.
We have so many amazing projects, new works and research endeavors in the College of Fine Arts right now, and I’m confident that our strategic plan will allow us to build on this incredible success and further expand the impact of our work in our communities and the broader world.
Sincerely,
Ramón H. Rivera-Servera
Dean, College of Fine Arts