Bauchard to lead Arts Management Program, Technē Institute

The College of Arts and Sciences has named Franck Bauchard as director of its Arts Management Program and the university’s Technē Institute.

Bauchard arrives at UB from Montpellier, France, where he was founder and executive director of La Panacée, an experimental, cross-disciplinary contemporary culture center. It is the most recent of Europe’s major arts centers created in the past 10 years encouraging a thematic approach to social issues and an integration of various art audiences.

Since its founding, La Panacée has been engaging artists, students and researchers by challenging the artistic perceptions of a changing world through exhibitions and events that inspire new relationships to the visual arts, new forms of writing — including digital communication techniques — and new media art.

Visitors to La Panacée experience art as both spectator and actor, exploring a variety of representations and practices of contemporary artistic creation.

An expert in multi- and interdisciplinary arts management and cultural policy, Bauchard’s innovative thinking about art, space and the development of new audiences folds neatly into the Technē Institute’s goal of fostering research and new work at the intersection of artistic expression and emerging technologies, and the UB Arts Management Program’s curriculum linking theory and practice.

The Arts Management Program increases students’ ability to identify and solve complex, interdisciplinary problems in the areas of arts management and cultural policymaking through specially designed management and law courses, fieldwork placements, site visits, meetings with senior art executives and an international summer school.

Bauchard’s appointment, effective with the beginning of the spring semester, was announced by Bruce Pitman, dean of the Collage of Arts and Sciences.

“The college is pleased to have Professor Bauchard’s international experience and perspective augment the existing strengths in Arts Management and Technē,” Pitman says. “We look forward to seeing the results of his contributions to programing.”

Bauchard has served as the French Ministry of Culture, artistic director of La Chartreuse de Villeneuve-les-Avignon and has curated exhibitions in Paris and Mons while also contributing widely to reviews, catalogs and books.

Nicolas Bourriaud, the noted French arts critic and curator, will succeed Bauchard at La Panacée.

“Digital/computational technologies work like a chemical agent to dissolve the conventional barriers that have separated the arts from one another and from the sciences” notes Roy Roussel, interim director and chair of the arts management search committee. “Franck Bauchard understands the possibilities opened by this. His appointment as director of Arts Management and of the Technē Institute means that UB will now be a leader in this important field.”

Bauchard’s appointment will further enhance the relationships among the UB Arts Management Program, the Technē Institute and all of the university’s arts departments, allowing for further student research and projects centered on the intersection of digital technologies and arts management practices. He will offer students new perspectives on creating environments for the arts in today’s digital age. 

“I am very interested to bring my professional experience to an academic context such as UB,” Bauchard says. “To work with the students on the new perspectives generated by digital environments for the future arts managers is an exciting challenge. The opportunity to bring together the Arts Management Program and the Technē Institute will offer new educational perspectives to this program by developing a project-based curriculum, as well as its national and international specificity. To work in UB’s Department of Media Study with its emblematic history in media study is especially meaningful.”