CUArts - Director's Note

Arts @ Columbia

Arts Initiative

Three Year Report

Gregory Mosher
April 2007
[download pdf]

Three years ago President Bollinger launched the Arts Initiative at Columbia University, asking us to re-imagine the university’s role in the arts, and the arts’ role in the university. Last year’s 2 Year Report listed more than a dozen projects and programs we created in response to our initial conversations with members of the Columbia community, new York City’s artists and arts administrators, and interested parties in Europe, Britain, Africa, and Asia. These projects brought together diverse fields, departments, programs and venues, and reached across the campus and the city. They engaged thousands of students and faculty, and some drew international attention. So it wasn’t a bad start. But President Bollinger’s mandate remained unfulfilled; the Arts Initiative was supplementing university life, but it wasn’t really engaging it.

President Václav Havel’s seven-week residency at Columbia in Fall 2006 changed that. The 25 events the Arts Initiative planned for Havel at Columbia involved partners across the city, including MoMA, the Public Theater, the Apollo and more, and these partners helped us explore the implications of Havel’s life as artist and citizen. But it was our Columbia colleagues at numerous schools and programs, most notably in the Core Curriculum, who drew the Initiative into Columbia’s educational bloodstream. Having finally arrived, we plan to keep circulating.

Havel at Columbia merged the Arts Initiative’s major channels, which number three. First, we provide a wide range of resources to the arts on campus: nearly 150 arts groups, libraries, programs, and venues. Second, we connect the campus to the wider culture, especially New York’s great cultural organizations, which we aim to make as accessible as Columbia’s coursework in the near future. Third, we connect the arts with other ways of looking at and acting in the world. The Havel residency was but one way do this, and we look forward to adding other models to the mix.

We’re deeply grateful to the countless students who continue to shape the Arts Initiative by sharing their ideas for a creative life at Columbia. Many professors guided our efforts during this third year, and we thank them all. Deans Quigley and Yatrakis, and the administration, faculty and staff of the Core Curriculum welcomed the Initiative’s support for Columbia’s signature program; we look forward to working with them ever more closely. Our generous donors, including members of the Havel Host Committee and especially Lord David and Lady Susie Sainsbury, provided crucial support, for which we are most grateful. Provost Brinkley has been an unflagging source of encouragement and sustenance, and President Bollinger has continued to make clear, in countless ways, that his commitment to the arts as a part of each student’s educational experience is unsurpassed.

2006 New or Expanded Programming

CUArts.com
CUARts.com is Columbia’s portal to the arts on campus and beyond. Its raft of features include an arts calendar, NYC cultural listings, Arts Initiative programs such as the Art Train and Sainsbury Support Fund, arts jobs and internships, rehearsal and performance spaces, the Alumni in the Arts list, and much more. The weekly e-newsletter, listing special attractions at affordable prices, goes to nearly 4,000 people.

The Gatsby Charitable Foundation Student Arts Fund
A generous grant from The Gatsby Charitable Foundation on behalf of Lord David and Lady Susie Sainsbury funded 44 extracurricular student arts projects in 2006. The recipients, who study in widely diverse fields, created a series of remarkable events, programs and publications in virtually all artistic disciplines including music, theatre, dance, film, visual arts and creative writing.

Columbia Alumni Arts League
2006 saw the creation and launch of CAAL, which provides alumni with discounts and special benefits at more than 30 of New York’s premiere cultural institutions. CAAL nights bring together alumni for arts events, conversations with artists, and other social engagements.

Havel at Columbia
President and playwright Václav Havel’s seven-week residency, which included speeches, panels, performances, screenings and classwork, resonated across the campus. The Arts Initiative’s Columbia partners included the Harriman Institute, the Center for Human rights Documentation and Research, Barnard College, and the Schools of Law, Journalism and the Arts. Cultural partners included the Public Theater, the Film Society at Lincoln Center, the Apollo Theater, The Nation, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Scores of artists, scholars, journalists, and civic figures participated in the events, among them Orhan Pamuk, Edward Albee, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Moore, Czech Ambassador to the UN Martin Palous and President Bill Clinton.

In support of the residency, Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning created www.havel.columbia.edu, which includes complete information about Havel’s visit. The site features video of most of the events, and interviews with artists and politicians ranging from President George H.W. Bush to Lou Reed.

Core Curriculum
President Havel delivered the Fall semester Core Contemporary Civilization Coursewide Lecture. Literary Humanities students read playwright Havel’s early play The Garden Party, and nearly a thousand students saw one of the two readings of the play. The Havel connection triggered a series of ongoing creative discussions about linking both university and off-campus cultural resources to the Core.

Columbia Partners
The Initiative continues to work with partners such as CC, GS, Barnard, SEAS, and Teacher’s College on projects ranging from Arts Advocacy in Harlem to the Columbia University Orchestra’s Music from the Inside concert.

School of the Arts
2006 saw increased collaboration with the administration, faculty, and students in the School of the Arts. While the Initiative’s university-wide mandate naturally focuses on future audiences, it is committed to supporting as fully as possible those students who seek a life in the creative arts.

Career Education and Training
Often working with the Columbia Center for Career Education, the Initiative organizes arts networking events, and CUArts.com hosts a very popular listing of internships and part-time work in NYC arts organizations.

Passport to New York
Passport provides free admission to all current undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at Columbia University and its affiliates at 27 of New York City’s finest museums.

Alumni in the Arts
CUArts.com now lists several hundred Columbians in the arts. To name but a few: Paul Robeson, Eudora Welty, Joseph Heller Georgia O'Keeffe, Jhumpa Lahiri, Isamu Noguchi, Suzanne Vega, Hurston and Hughes, Rogers and Hammerstein, and of course Ginsberg and Kerouac.

Art Train
The Art Train provides expertly guided tours – by Columbia MA, MFA or PhD candidates - of New York’s most interesting galleries, followed by refreshments and conversation.

New Yorker Nights
This series, produced in collaboration with The New Yorker magazine, grew out of the success of a public conversation between New Yorker editor David Remnick and Joan Didion, whose The Year of Magical Thinking had just been published. Writers included Dr. Oliver Sacks, Simon Schama, Malcolm Gladwell and many others.

Music from Central Asia
The Aga Khan Trust for Culture provided a remarkable series of events, including a special children’s concert, presented by the Initiative in partnership with SIPA and Columbia’s Center for Ethno-musicology.

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